McDowell strives to see the upside amid Front Row's run of misfortune

01/05/2024 21:53

Michael McDowell knows how poorly things have gone for his Front Row Motorsports team in recent weeks.

Sort of.

"How many?" McDowell double-takes when it's pointed out that he's failed to finish the last three consecutive NASCAR Cup Series races. "I think it's like five (that) it feels like."

McDowell finished 35th at Texas Motor Speedway after crashing in Turn 3 while battling side-by-side with Ross Chastain for the lead on lap 143. A week later, McDowell crashed from the race lead on the final lap at Talladega Superspeedway when he tried to block a run by Brad Keselowski. He finished 31st. Then a hub failure last weekend at Dover Motor Speedway resulted in a 36th-place finish.

And if you were to expand the data and look at his past six results, McDowell's highest finish was 21st at Martinsville Speedway. During that stretch, there was another DNF for a steering failure at Circuit of The Americas.

All told McDowell's average finish in the last six weeks is 31.2.

"Yes, get you some of that," McDowell said.

The results are far worse than McDowell's mood. The veteran driver was upbeat and even comedic at times during his time with a small group of reporters earlier this week.

"No doubt, it's been a rough few weeks," McDowell said. "Some of the poor finishes have been my self-inflicted wounds. Some have been our self-inflicted wounds from a team (standpoint) and preparation and parts."

Dover was one of those. The right-front hub broke and forced McDowell's exit after 285 laps. It's a sealed spec part with only one previous race on it. McDowell further revealed that it didn't have previous damage on it, nor was it out-mileage, so there were no indications his No. 34 team did anything wrong.

"It was just a failure," McDowell said. "Sometimes you have failures. So, it's just been a rough stretch. I've been here before and I've always been on the flip side of it where you're running 20th all day, somehow you steal a top 10, and you're like, 'I'm going to leave as fast as I can before they figure out that we stole this one.'

"Then it happens again the next week and you're like, 'Holy cow, we just stole three top 10s.' So, I've been on the other side where it feels like you can't do anything wrong and I've been on this side where you just can't put it together for the life of you."

The slump has pushed McDowell from eying up a playoff spot from 17th in the standings to sitting 29th. He has not had a top-10 finish since early March at Phoenix Raceway.

"It's no fun," McDowell said. "If you stay in your mind about it, it can mess you up. But I don't. If I break it down analytically and think about it, I can give you good excuses for all of them. Excuses don't produce results in racing and we all know that. But having answers is important. So, if you replace that word excuses with answers, we have an answer to why these things happened and so we're not in a panic of, 'Oh man, we don't have speed.' We have speed and we can run in the top 10. We just have to have everything cleaned up a little bit, and that's on all fronts.

"Yeah, it's been rough, but I don't feel like we'll stay there."

McDowell took full blame for crashing in Texas, yet he also noted that he was the first driver to try to run wide-open and side-by-side with the leader through a corner. In hindsight, McDowell wouldn't have run so hard but tucked himself in line and let the stage play out. Talladega was a fight for the win on the last lap.

The hub failure at Dover came after a speeding penalty. It was a penalty McDowell's team was convinced couldn't happen because of where their pit box was on pit road. But the math was wrong about not being able to speed in that segment with where the scoring loop was in McDowell's pit stall.

McDowell came off pit road inside the top 10 before the penalty. However, he acknowledged that the hub was going to break regardless.

As for reclaiming all his lost ground in the point standings, McDowell knows it's a difficult situation. He made the postseason last year with a win at the Indianapolis road course, which is no longer on the schedule. McDowell mentioned Ford teammate Joey Logano and how the start of the season was similarly tough on him before turning things around.

"I kind of look at it as there's still a lot of racing left," McDowell said. "We still have a lot of racetracks left. So, if we can dig ourselves in a hole in four weeks, we can dig ourselves out of a hole in five or six. But the hole is getting mighty deep. To be honest with you that hasn't been my mindset or our approach all year. Our mindset and approach have been we need to win a race.

"This year is different because I don't think you have to win a race to make it in based on how many races Denny's won and Larson and William . It seems like we're not going to have 17 winners this year, so I don't think you have to (win) from that standpoint."

McDowell doesn't think it's impossible to point his way into the postseason, but his team will have to "crush it" with results and stage points. Having speed helps, and McDowell was adamant that despite what it might seem, his team has top 15 to top 10 speed at most tracks.

"The hard part about stage points is in order to really maximize the stage points, you have to have top-five speed," he said. "We've done a good job of getting one point, two points, three points because we're right in that eighth, ninth, 10th (place) in the stages. But to really put a dent in it, you need to be running fifth or sixth and then fourth and getting bigger points that add up a lot faster. We probably need a little bit more to really maximize what's available stage points-wise."