Ford Performance Notes and Quotes
NASCAR Cup Series
NASCAR Media Zoom | Wednesday, September 8, 2021
Michael McDowell, driver of the No. 34 Love’s Travel Stops Ford Mustang, is making his first appearance in the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs. He goes into this weekend’s race at Richmond Raceway 20 points below the final transfer position for the Round of 12. He spoke about his situation as part of a NASCAR Zoom call earlier today.
MICHAEL MCDOWELL, No. 34 Love’s Travel Stops Ford Mustang — HOW MUCH OF YOUR STRATEGY IS NOW GOING FOR WINS VERSUS WHERE YOU FINISH IN THE OVERALL STANDINGS AND NOT WANTING TO RISK TOO MUCH? “I think that we are just gonna continue to try to be as aggressive as we can. Obviously, Darlington didn’t go how we wanted it, which doesn’t make us back down anymore. It actually, if anything, we have to be more aggressive. We want to finish up as high as we can in the points, but we also feel like we’re in a spot where we want to be aggressive and see if we can’t get through to the next round.”
DO YOU STILL SEE A PATH TO GET TO THE NEXT ROUND BY POINTS? “Yeah, for sure. I think at the beginning of Darlington it didn’t look that promising with us being the first car out, but then beyond that a lot of those cars had issues and the point gap isn’t that big and Richmond and Bristol both can be races where you have a lot of attrition and a lot of issues, so it’s definitely not that far out of reach. At first I thought it was gonna be impossible, but after the race played out I feel like there’s still a chance.”
HAVE YOU HAD A CHANCE TO FIGURE OUT WHAT HAPPENED? “I have had the opportunity to go back and look at data and watch it and kind of replay it all. Yeah, definitely that section was tricky just because you’re going from old asphalt to new asphalt, but that’s not really the cause. The cause was I was being pretty aggressive trying to get around the 43 because he was on old tires and I just gassed it up to try to clear him going into two and just was carrying too much speed and got loose. It’s just a mistake and it’s unfortunate, but there’s nowhere to place blame but myself. I was just trying to get around the 43 as quick as possible and not lose momentum and time. We had a good run going. We had a fast car. We felt like track position was gonna be important, so you don’t want to give anything up. If you can hit the rewind and do it all over, I would do it differently but you don’t get the rewind button so you just have to keep moving on and get ready for this weekend.”
WHY DO YOU THINK SO MANY PLAYOFF DRIVERS HAD TROUBLE AT DARLINGTON? “I don’t think that there’s any real reason other than Darlington is tough and it’s a tough racetrack. You get in the wall a little bit and you’ve got a fender rub and you cut down a tire. Just so much can happen there, and so I think it’s just one of those racetracks that it definitely can cause that type of race, but you just never know because you watch Kyle Larson those last 10 laps and he’s bouncing off the wall and never cut a tire until the end there, so you never know. It’s a tough track. It’s just the way that it all played out, but we’ve seen races like Bristol and races like that kind of be that way too, so having these tough tracks in these first three it is gonna create some opportunity to maybe get some points back.”
DO YOU REMEMBER WHERE YOU WERE ON 9/11? “I was in Chandler, Arizona on my way to work at the Bob Bondurant School. That’s where I worked at the time. I would have to do the math, but I was 17, 18 years old and when I got to work everybody was kind of just sitting around. You could tell something was going on and all kind of sitting around a small TV watching what was happening and about the time I got to work the second plane had crashed into the building, so it was one of those moments that you never forget — just not understanding what was happening and what was going on and seeing it. It was just kind of an overwhelming thing. I think everybody was very somber and overwhelmed with what’s happening and not knowing what the future would hold, and what was going on. And then you hear rumblings of other planes and the Pentagon and all these things happening. You’re trying to figure out what’s happening. It all seems like it’s happening at once, so as a young adult, teenage at the time, the thing that stands out to me was the next few days after and watching TV and watching first responders go into the building day after day after day after day and going through the rubble and pulling people out. There was a sense of unity and bond, I feel like, across every American and as tragic of an event as it was, it was this really incredible time where you felt like everybody was on the same team and everybody was focused on the right things, so it’s something that stands out to me for sure.”
HOW DO YOU APPROACH RICHMOND? “Richmond has definitely been a tough track for us as an organization and as a group, so we’ve been working really hard the last few months on the simulator and trying to come up with a new package there because what we’ve had hasn’t been working and so we’re just relying on our tools and relying on past experiences and trying to come up with a new package. We know it’s a big question mark race for us, but at the same time we went into Darlington with not knowing how we would stack up speed-wise and even though the result doesn’t show it, we actually brought a really fast race car and had a lot of speed, so I feel like we have the potential to do that again at Richmond and I know for sure we can do it Bristol because Bristol has actually been a strong track for us in the past. You don’t know until you unload. Unfortunately, without practice and all that, you don’t get a lot of opportunities to work on it, so you just have to trust your tools and your people and we’re all working hard and hopefully we hit it.”
DOES IT PLAY TO YOUR ADVANTAGE WITH THE 750 PACKAGE THESE NEXT TWO RACES? “No. I mean, the 750 package hasn’t been our strength. In our group, the 550 tracks have been better for us, so it’s not a strength for us, but, like I said, Darlington was a good example of what we could do as far as speed and performance, so I feel like we’re in a good direction and hopefully we’ll be able to have that same kind of speed at Richmond.”
THE SAME TIRE BEING USED AT RICHMOND WILL BE USED AT PHOENIX. HOW MUCH CARRIES OVER WITH THIS PACKAGE? “Not a lot. I mean, Richmond is kind of that old wore out surface. You have tire fall off, a lot of tire fall off, and you go to Phoenix and it’s fast and it’s smooth and you don’t have a ton of fall off, so I think that you’re always learning a few things, but I don’t feel like Richmond is an indicator of what you’ll have at Phoenix or there’s a whole lot to take from it.”
WE’VE SEEN COMMITMENT LINE VIOLATIONS AT RICHMOND. IS THERE ANYTHING IN PARTICULAR THAT MAKES THAT LINE MORE CHALLENGING AT RICHMOND? “No, it’s definitely a challenge I think just because the tires are worn out so much and a lot of green flag stops. I think Darlington and Richmond both are tough tracks as far as green flag stops and green flag cycles and not making mistakes. The pit roads are also curved, so that makes it tricky for us, the drives and the teams, as far as pit road speed and I think that’s why you see so many penalties too because you run different lights at the beginning and the end and that can get tricky as you’re accelerating and slowing down at different spots, so Richmond and Darlington are both tough racetracks to get onto pit road without making a mistake, and I think it’s more than anything the tire wear and you’re slip sliding around. When you’re coming to pit road you’re braking hard, you lock up the tire, it’s very easy to slide over that box for sure.”
HOW LONG DID IT TAKE TO GET OVER SUNDAY NIGHT? “I wish it was that easy. For me, there is always that internal wrestle and battle that you have, especially when it’s 100 percent your fault. I mean, there’s certain circumstances that are out of my control, out of my team’s control, and those are easier to stomach than when you just make a mistake, and then to add onto that we had a fast race car. The guys did a great job of preparing it and spent a lot of time as the playoffs were ramping up. Obviously these first three races we knew how important they would be, so there was a lot of emphasis on these race cars and so you feel like you let everybody down and that’s hard. It’s a hard thing to kind of navigate through, but you’ve got to get ready for next week and you’ve got to move on. I’ve got a great team around me. I think that’s part of what makes Front Row special is we have a really tight group, especially the 34 car. We’re all really tight on the 34 car and obviously everybody is disappointed and it’s a tough thing to do and to walk back to the hauler and see a wrecked race car and all those things, but my guys have been really supportive. We have a good team, so it took me up until about yesterday. As far as watching the end of the race and seeing all the other guys have trouble, it was a mix. The mix was it does create the opportunity for us not to be so far back, but the other side of it was it was one of those races where if you played it cool and didn’t hit anything you were gonna run 15th pretty easy and we would be in a much different spot. Like I said, you can’t hit rewind, but if you would have known that going into it, I would have probably approached things a little bit differently, but if I approached it differently maybe it wouldn’t have worked out that way either. You can’t overthink it. I think I’ve definitely analyzed a lot of things, analyzed a lot of data, looked at what I can do and can’t do. Sometimes that’s good and bad. It’s good because I’m always learning and growing and figuring out how I could be better, but it’s bad because I can’t necessarily shut it off and just be OK with, ‘I got loose. It’s over. That’s done.’ I tend to look at those things pretty in-depth.”
DID YOU WATCH THE END OF THE RACE OR DID YOU DRIVE HOME, AND WHEN THE OTHER GUYS HAD TROUBLE WERE YOU HAPPY? I’M SURE YOU DON’T WISH ILL WILL ON ANYONE, BUT IT WORKED OUT BETTER FOR YOU IN THE END. “I think as I was watching the race I wasn’t really thinking about it too much like that until I got to the end and saw the points and all that. Like I said, it’s a little bit of a mix for me. Being in that so many guys had trouble it keeps us in the fight, but it also is a little bit of a kick because you just know that those were points and probably positions that would have been hard to get otherwise, and so they were kind of free to take if we didn’t make that mistake. But I did watch it and watched the race, but as far as feelings when people fall out, I don’t get excited when people have trouble. But when you get to the end and you see how the points laid out I felt like we still had a chance, and without those guys having trouble we’d be pretty far back.”
WHY DID YOU WATCH? WAS IT SOMETHING TO LEARN OR JUST TO WATCH? “I watched because I’m into it. I want to see who is running well, what they’re doing, what line they were running. It’s hard for me to turn that off even if you have a night like we had when we were out, so you’re paying attention on who is doing what and how the pit cycles are going and all those things. I still can’t stop thinking about, ‘I wonder if we would have pitted early here or pittled later there or what would have happened if this cycled out,’ so I stayed pretty engaged with it all even after a tough day like that.”
