NASCAR CUP SERIES
WATKINS GLEN INTERNATIONAL
TEAM CHEVY DRIVER QUOTES
AUGUST 9, 2025
Michael McDowell, driver of the No. 71 Spire Motorsports Camaro ZL1 and No. 11 Kaulig Racing Camaro SS, met with the media in advance of running double-duty in the NASCAR Cup and Xfinity Series at Watkins Glen International.
Media Availability Quotes:
MICHAEL, JUMPING INTO THE XFINITY CAR THIS WEEKEND. UM, WHAT’S YOUR EXCITEMENT LEVEL ABOUT THAT? AND GETTING SOME EXTRA LAPS AROUND HERE?
“Yeah, it’s been a long time, so it’s been exciting. Yeah, it’s been fun. I haven’t driven the car yet, but just, you know, the prep work and some of the simulator work and yeah, it’s nerve racking too, just because the cars are very different than the Next Gen Cup cars. But, you know, thankful for the opportunity and I’m glad to get some, you know, more reps and, you know, last time I ran, Xfinity car was Road America 2016 and felt like, man, I’m not going to get it in one of these things again unless I could win, and I feel like this is a car that I can win in. So, I’m excited to give it a shot.”
ON THE CUP SIDE OF THINGS? WHAT’S THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS WEEKEND? I WOULDN’T SAY THAT THIS IS YOUR, LAST CHANCE TO WIN.
“It’s do or die for sure, yeah. I mean, yes, we have more opportunities. I mean, we’re not we can go to Richmond and run well too, and obviously, Daytona, I feel like we have a shot at it. But to me, this is the only way you control your own destiny is to win here. The other two are very tough to execute and have everything go your way, so times winding down, as you guys know, right? And, the pressure always ramps up as the times winding down, but I’ve been in the spot before, and, yeah, definitely feel confident that our road course programs, you know, been really good. And if we do our job and we have a fast car and we qualify well today, and we can start up front, we we’ll have a shot at it.”
ONE BIG MOMENT IN YOUR LIFE THAT DID CHANGE WAS THAT 2016 WIN IN ROAD AMERICA, LOT HAS HAPPENED SINCE THEN, BUT CAN YOU GO BACK TO THAT DAY, YOU KNOW, WITH RCR AND HOW YOU WON THAT RACE AND KIND OF WHAT IT DID TO YOU MENTALLY, AND HAD YOUR CAREER AT THE TIME.
“Yeah, it was it was a great moment. There’s a lot of funny stories. You know, I’d driven the Gibbs car a couple years prior to that at those places and sat on the pole and led the most laps and had shots at winning and just never got to the finish line. You know, green/white/checkers or fuel miles or whatever it is. and with the RCR group, I had one race, you know, sort of one race, one shot, and it all worked out. Just a good execution all day and no problems, and kind of like how you dreamed it up to be, where, you know, the last several before that that Gibbs cars, like, I probably had more speed and more of a dominant day, but it just didn’t work out, so to have it all finally come together was a big relief, honestly, just because it had been, you know, such a long time and so close. But just a funny part of, you know, the journey there is Sam Hornish was practicing qualifying my car in Michigan, my Cup car. And so, you know, he ran the car Saturday, and I obviously won the race, flew back to Michigan, and I talked to Sam for a little bit, and honestly, he just personally did me a favor of practicing qualifying that car. It’s not something I think he truly wanted to do. And I said, “How was it?” And he’s like, “Man, I know it’s probably me, ’cause I haven’t driven, but it’s so bad. I remember thinking, “Oh, it can’t be that bad, right? It’s going to be okay.” And then the next day, I don’t I’m going to exaggerate, but I’m telling you, I ran 38th, three laps down, and I got done with the race, and everything about Saturday had already been forgotten. Because you just get out and you’re like, how could it could it be that? I honestly was like, I wish I’d have flown home. I wish I’d have gone directly home because, you know, that moment, that high was gone so fast, but when you get back home and you see your family and all that, and you celebrate, but it’s just how humbling this sport is, you know, to go to Road America on Saturday and win. And, you know, I think the thing that I remember the most, honestly, was Sunday morning at the drivers meeting of, you know, just all the owners and other drivers, and people just congratulating me and coming up and going out of their way. And, you know, at that time, I’d driven for a lot of different teams, you know, and so that was a cool moment, and then humble pie came super quick in the race on Sunday and, yeah, it’s just funny how this sport works.”
I WANTED TO ASK YOU WHAT YOUR CONFIDENCE LEVEL IS LIKE THIS WEEKEND? I MEAN, IT FEELS LIKE YOU’VE DONE SO WELL ON THE ROAD COURSES AND THEN SOMETHING CRAZY HAS HAPPENED AND YOU HAVEN’T BEEN THERE AT THE VERY, VERY END. BUT WHAT IS YOUR CONFIDENCE LEVEL LIKE HERE AT WATKINS GLEN?
“Yeah, confidence is, you know, is interesting. We talk about a lot of our sport, and it’s a real thing. But I think momentum’s more of a real thing than confidence, and they correlate, they go together. I mean, I think I show up every weekend feeling like I can win. And, you know, obviously, the real courses are a little bit more pep in our step just because they’ve been our strength, and that’s more of the momentum, you know, when you run top five, most of them, you know that you have a fighting chance at it. And, yeah, but with confidence, I’ll say this, is that, you know, I showed up as Sonoma, thinking after Chicago, that we were gonna be the car to beat, and we weren’t. And that’s how finicky Cup racing is. We still ran well. We still ran in the top five, but we didn’t have the outright pace that we needed to do what we needed to do at Sonoma. But we come in here confident that we got it all right, and that we will. And so I feel like we this is probably our strongest track as a group last year, you know, all three Spire cars were in the top ten, and, you know, individually, even though the results won’t show it, this is probably my best track from an outright speed standpoint. You know, we’ve had an engine failure and a bunch of issues over the last three years, but let a lot of laps and been out front a lot here, so confidence is high. But you got to execute, and you know, you got to hit everything just right.”
YOU KIND OF MENTIONED HOW THIS PLACE IS ONE OF YOUR FAVORITES. HOW SIMILAR DO YOU FEEL LIKE THE ROAD COURSE PROGRAMMING IS NOW INSPIRED COMPARED TO WHAT YOU WERE USED TO THE LAST FEW YEARS?
“Yeah, it’s not even close. Um, I sort of we sort of had to abandon that ship fairly early on of what we used to run versus what we run now. It just hasn’t worked. I think we’ve talked about that a few times, so we went to the mindset of this is gonna be a slower building process, than we had hoped, but it’s actually worked out because we, you know, we went to COTA and learned things there, and then, you know, I kind of transferred over into Mexico and felt like we made a next step, and then went to Chicago and made a next step, and then went to Sonoma and took a step back, and hopefully we’ve made that next step back forward. And so just slowly building that package around me and around the baseline that they’ve had, which is very different than what I’ve ran the last two years.”
MICHAEL, THE UNIQUE CHARACTERISTICS OF WATKINS, GLEN. WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR THE FEEL? I MEAN, YOU TALKED ABOUT GETTING GOOD QUALIFYING ONE. WHAT DOES THAT FEEL? WHAT ARE SOME KEY AREAS YOU’LL BE LOOKING AT IN THAT PRACTICE SESSION TODAY TO SAY, “OH, WE’RE PRETTY GOOD, OR AH, WE HAVE SOME WORK TO DO.” THIS SPECIFIC RACETRACK RELATED?”
“Yeah, it’s different here for the race than it is for qualifying, what you’re looking for, I should say, because we’re a lap time and speeds made is not necessarily where passing’s made. So, it’s a little bit of two different things. I mean, you got to be good in all the corners, you don’t have any room for throwaways, but, you know, your lap time and your speed’s going to come from the esses. The esses and the bus stop. But you don’t pass so much there, you pass into turn one and you pass into turn six. And so, for this practice here, you’re focusing on both of, what do I need to make, you know, ultimate lap time and am I good in these areas leading up to the passing zones? So, it is unique from that standpoint where some of the other tracks are more straightforward of where you need to be strong. This, I think, is different for lap time than it is for race.”
SO THAT BEING SAID, WHEN WE SEE WHAT SHANE HAS DONE WINNING THE LAST THREE ROAD COURSES, WHY IS IT THAT SOMEBODY LIKE HIM CAN BE AT TIMES THAT DOMINANT AND HAVE THAT MUCH SUCCESS WHEN EVERYBODY HAS THE OPPORTUNITY TO LOOK AT ALL THE DATA FROM HIM AND STUDY HIM IN EVERY WAY POSSIBLE, THAT IT WOULD SEEM LIKE THE DATA WOULD PREVENT OR MAKE IT EASIER FOR SOMEBODY TO BREAK THAT STREAK, AND YOU WOULDN’T SEE SOMEBODY WIN THREE A ROW.
“Yeah, I mean, I would relate to this just because, um, you know, social media or Instagram, you see somebody working out on lifting weights, doesn’t mean that you know how to get fit. It’s kind of the same thing with data, is you can look at it all you want, and you can say, I need to do this, but actually doing it is different. You know, your muscle memory and having the car set up in the feel and, you know, all the uniqueness to a driving style. You know, the guys that talk about that were Denny and those guys that, you know, had a clear advantage in the old car and short tracks, Denny’s phenomenal with saving tires and all the things he did. So there was maybe a few little trade secrets that you could learn, but as we’ve seen, going and doing what he did there’s still hard to do, right? And so you can see the data, but duplicating it and duplicating the feel and you’re not driving their car as well. You don’t know what their setups are, you don’t know, you know, what they’re doing, that allows, you know, a person to approach it like that. So, it gives you, it gives you an area to work on. It gives you an area to identify, okay, this is where I’m getting beat. How can I get better?” But just trying to do what somebody else does is really hard. And you see that even with teammates. You know, you see inside of organizations, you know, guys that have the same cars and have all the information, can’t do the same things, and I think it’s more of driving style and each of us is fairly unique. but it does help to highlight where you got to get better.”
YOU SPOKE EARLIER ABOUT THE SUCCESS THAT SPIRE HAD LAST YEAR HERE. THEY ALSO HAD SUCCESS YESTERDAY WITH 15 YEAR OLD TRISTAN MCKEE, AND I’M CURIOUS, I KNOW YOU TAUGHT AT BONDURANT, BUT WHAT WERE YOU DOING AT 15?
“Yeah, not winning at Watkins Glen. Yeah, it’s really awesome to see and, you know, obviously, we’ve invested a lot into seeing the potential and where it could go, and at a young age, it’s so hard. It’s hard because. I would say if you just look at, like Joey Logano, you look at Kyle Larson, you look at all the young guys at that 14, 15, 16 age, they were dominant in everything that they did, but as you take that next step and next step and next step, it just gets harder and harder and harder and, you know, obviously, he rose to the occasion yesterday, and, you had things go his way, for sure. I mean, Brent Cruz was, you know, pretty dominant all day, but he put himself in position and he executed and to do that at 15 years old is extremely hard with a tremendous amount of pressure of it being his first race, so it was really cool to see. You know, it was it was a fun moment, too, you know, for me, because, you know, obviously I’m vested here at Spire and plan on being here a long time, and we’ll have a part in picking my replacement, which it looks like my replacement’s been picked, and the faster he gets through all these series, the faster I’m gonna be out of the seat. So it was a little bit of those moments of like, I still like driving. If this guy keeps doing this, this is gonna be really short for me. But, no, I mean, I feel like it’s great. And to have, you know, depth of young talent is super important, and, you know, I think the sky’s the limit, and it’s just gonna be about putting him in the right situations, and then also, too, you know, you got to be careful not to rush it, and, um, it’s easy for us to all do that, because of yesterday, right? I mean, we’ve seen it in our sport before, it’s like, ah, and then you just keep rushing it, rushing and rushing it, and sometimes that makes it a little bit too much, because you don’t get all the fundamentals that you need to progress to the next level. So, the good news is, is there’s a plan in place, and he has a lot of time available to him, right? And so it’s really not a rush because of how far ahead he is. And so, yeah, it was very cool to watch.”
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