By Jerry Jordan, Editor
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Michael McDowell knows how important it is in a NASCAR driver’s career to get the pole position, especially at Daytona International Speedway, and he honestly hoped his teammate Todd Gilliland would be on top but he wasn’t backing out of the throttle coming to the start/finish line.
“I know you won’t believe me but there was a part of me hoping that Todd would have gotten that pole. I know how important it is and I know how long it took me to get my first one,” McDowell said. “We already have three this year, so I was thinking we could share the love but I wasn’t going to get off the gas to make it happen.”
McDowell admitted that in the past, Front Row Motorsports hadn’t put that much work into winning the pole when they came to Daytona, whether for the Daytona 500 or the summer race, the Cole Zero Sugar 400. But this year, that changed and the team put in a ton of work to get the No. 34 Love’s Travel Stop Ford ready for the Daytona 500 and sat in P2 to start the race. Now, he has the No. 34 Long John Silver Ford atop the scoring pylon.
“It’s a funny story, actually,” he said. “So, qualifying has never been a strength for us at superspeedways, but we’ve always raced really well, and so we always though, ‘Ah, it takes so much time and energy to get all these little, small details just perfect to go out there and beat fenders side-by-side, three-wide and is it worth all the effort.’
“And so we just decided, ‘OK, we are going to take as much time as we possibly have available to execute everything that we can to the best of our ability and really focus on taking our time and trying to do every detail perfect.’ And it was kind of an inside joke at the shop or just one of those jokes of like, ‘Hey, if we go to Daytona for the Daytona 500 and we qualify 18th, we are never, ever putting this much time and energy into another race car again.’ I mean, it was just a massive amount of time and energy by everybody at Front Row. We came down here and we qualified second and we all looked at each other like, ‘Oh, you know what this means? It means we’ve got to do this every single time.’ We set the bar high for ourselves, so that just moved the bar internally and so when we went to Atlanta and sat on the pole, I mean, obviously, it’s the superspeedway package, but it’s not like Daytona and Talladega where it’s just easy flat, like we saw guys hit the wall and spin out in qualifying, so it’s not exactly the same, but we sat on the pole there, and then sort of knew going to Talladega that if we did everything well and found those fine little details that we’d have a shot at it. That’s the long story of it. Kind of shortened up, we just kind of proved to ourselves that with a lot of extra, and when I say a lot I mean a lot of extra time that it matters and we just put that time in and it’s paid off.”
For his part, Gilliland was a little bummed that McDowell edged him out for the top spot at Daytona, especially since he was atop the board for the entire first round of qualifying. He said he and McDowell discussed them both starting on the front row and knew his teammate would be as fast as he was.
“Michael is a tough one to beat,” Gilliland said. “He’s been pushing us to new levels since I got to the Cup Series and we continue to do that. Second isn’t too bad and we’ll be on the front row and race him from there.”
With the two Front Row Motorsports cars being the fastest in the field during qualifying there was a lot of chatter about the two of them racing for the win at the end of the race. Both admitted racing at Daytona and taking the checkered flag is a tall order but think it is a possibility. McDowell added that he has never really been in a position to race Gilliland for the win before.
“We haven’t gotten to the last lap and been nose-to-tail and had a shot at trying to win the race together, but from my standpoint, the best thing that we can do for our team and for ourselves is to work together because we have fast cars and if we can work together, and we’ve seen guys do it well.”
McDowell said that in 2023, Chris Buescher and Brad Keselowski were prime examples of how teammates can work together at Daytona – pointing out that Keselowski may have made a different move if it was a different driver he was racing with.
“The 6 and the 17 here last year did a great job and I think if it wasn’t Chris Buescher leading that race in front of Brad (Keselowski), Brad would have drove that race much different that last lap,” McDowell said. “He did give himself a chance to win, but didn’t ever put Chris in a situation where he wasn’t going to, if that makes sense. And I think that’s what it comes down to. I don’t want to take away a win from Todd. I want to win myself tomorrow night, but if we’re in that situation, you have to play it out to where, is my move gonna hurt both of us or is it gonna help one of us, or both of us?
“So, you don’t know until you’re in that situation and we haven’t been there yet to know on that last lap coming off of turn four what we would do, but it really is situational just like anything else. Hopefully, we’re in that spot.”