Did You Notice? … Front Row Motorsports led more laps Sunday (Feb. 25) at Atlanta Motor Speedway than any race in their history?
Michael McDowell and Todd Gilliland combined for 85 laps led in the Ambetter Health 400; that’s more than any full season for FRM in the NASCAR Cup Series with the exception of last year.
Now in its 20th year of running at the sport’s top level, it feels like FRM is on the verge of a breakthrough. We’ve seen flashes of it over the past couple years, from McDowell’s upset victory in the 2021 Daytona 500 to him beating one of the sport’s best road racers, Chase Elliott, mano a mano at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course last August.
McDowell went on to struggle in the postseason but still ended up a career-best 15th in the final standings, posting a career-best 97 laps led. He was the sixth-best Ford driver overall, a pretty impressive feat when you consider the strong seasons both Team Penske and RFK Racing put together ahead of them.
For 2024, FRM invested in its success, re-signing both McDowell and Gilliland while aligning with Penske’s championship operation from 2023. The technical alliance also elevates the team into a Tier 1 program, an important step in their evolution that provides access to top-level equipment and resources.
Could anyone have imagined this moment for an organization that posted just three lead-lap finishes during its first four years competing in the sport? Who for years put all their efforts into superspeedway racing knowing that was the only place they could win. It’s been a slow, steady build into where they are today, armed with a youthful veteran in McDowell (who turns 40 years old this year) and one of the sport’s hot young talents in Gilliland (just 23).
“A racer’s mindset isn’t suited to be patient. We all want results immediately,” Mark Rushbrook, global director of Ford Performance Motorsports said when the Penske partnership got announced. “But the way [owner] Bob Jenkins and [General Manager] Jerry Freeze have built Front Row Motorsports through the years is a model for how it should be done.”
The keys to their success: never getting themselves in too deep a financial hole they couldn’t get out of, focusing their resources on where they could compete and finding a driver in McDowell who was cast aside elsewhere and hungry to prove himself. Keeping him for the 2024 season wasn’t easy; McDowell was courted by other…
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