The 2024 NASCAR Cup Series season has the perfect makings for Front Row Motorsports’ best season yet — at least, that’s what I thought in February.
It was announced during Speedweeks that FRM was upgraded to a Tier 1 alliance with Ford and formed a technical alliance with Team Penske. The news was immediately followed with a front-row start for Michael McDowell in the Daytona 500 and his first-ever Cup pole in his 467th start the following week at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
Everything was looking up to start 2024, and FRM was fresh off of McDowell’s dominant victory at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course last July. The win locked him into the playoffs, and he wasn’t far from clinching a playoff spot on points alone. He scored eight top-10 finishes in 2023 — second only to the 12 top 10s he had in 2022 — and led a career-high 97 laps last season.
But nearly a third of the 2024 season is complete, and it’s been a rough start for McDowell in particular.
The Daytona 500? He was out of the running after a mechanical problem early in the race caused him to finish 36th, 24 laps off the pace. He rebounded to finish eighth at Atlanta, leading 27 laps after winning the pole. An uneventful 25th at Las Vegas Motor Speedway was followed by another eighth-place finish at Phoenix Raceway — the only top 10 for FRM this season on a non-drafting track.
After an 11th-place finish in the heavy tire-wear battle at Bristol Motor Speedway, McDowell sat 17th in points after five races. Not a bad start by any means, so why are we here?
Because in the last month and a half, it’s been a brutal, ugly stretch for McDowell and the No. 34 team. He’s had a mind-boggling average finish of 31.7 in his last six races, and he’s currently riding of streak of three consecutive DNFs.
Circuit of the Americas? Steering issues leave McDowell with a 38th-place finish after he had worked his way inside the top 15. Unremarkable 26th- and 21st-place finishes at Richmond Raceway and Martinsville Speedway, respectively, are then followed by a 36th-place finish at Texas Motor Speedway, where he crashed out from second place on a restart.
The race at Talladega Superspeedway on April 21 — a race where he won the pole and led a race-high 36 laps — saw McDowell with the lead out of turn 4 on the final lap, only to finish 31st after a poorly timed block on Brad Keselowski led to a big crash. The most recent race at Dover Motor Speedway…
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