Winning the Daytona 500 freed Michael McDowell from a burden he didn’t know he carried

When Michael McDowell squeaked through a fiery crash to win last year’s Daytona 500, he was in disbelief. After spending most of his career as a relative unknown, he had become the champion of the NASCAR Cup Series’ biggest race.

As the days moved on and the celebration faded, McDowell noticed a different, strange feeling. Relief. Fourteen years of pent-up pressure from 357 consecutive winless starts had disappeared.

“I didn’t even know I was carrying that until it was gone,” McDowell said recently in a Zoom session with Florida-based reporters.

The emotional baggage had collected slowly over the years for understandable reasons. The 37-year-old Arizona resident had never finished higher than 23rd in points and had only a dozen career top-10 finishes. McDowell had driven for eight Cup teams. Five of them have folded, and a sixth didn’t field a team last year.

McDowell’s current team, Front Row Motorsports, doesn’t have the budget to compete regularly with powerhouses like Team Penske, Hendrick Motorsports, Joe Gibbs Racing or Stewart-Haas Racing. Instead, McDowell figured his season boiled down to a handful of races a year: the unpredictable superspeedways of Daytona and Talladega and his other specialty, road courses.

“I looked at those four or five races every year and said, ‘This is it,’” McDowell said. “‘This is your last chance. You don’t have another year. You don’t have another opportunity. This is the only moment that you’re going to have.’”

Some internal pressure is natural, even helpful. It can give a driver the push needed to make a gutsy, race-winning pass at 200 mph. But too much of it can be unhealthy. That’s what McDowell learned a week later when he returned to Daytona International Speedway for its road course event, the O’Reilly Auto Parts 253.

His confidence hadn’t changed; he always believed in himself, so winning the 500 made no impact there. His preparation was the same as usual. So was his desire to win. Yet for some reason, McDowell felt uncharacteristically loose.

“And it was eerie, because I hadn’t felt that feeling,” McDowell said.

McDowell wondered if something was wrong. Eventually, he realized the now-or-never expectations he had saddled himself with at races like this for more than a decade were gone. He could relax (a little).

With the pressure lessened, McDowell saw his decision-making and patience improve. He stayed calm, drove his No. 34 Ford more methodically. He finished eighth at Daytona’s road course and sixth the next week at Homestead-Miami Speedway. It was the first time he had ever strung together three consecutive top-10 finishes.

Though McDowell finished a few yards short of winning at Talladega in April, he said he processed the final laps of that third-place run better than he did in his 500 triumph. He ended the season 16th in the standings with an average finish of 20.5 — both career highs.

McDowell will return to Daytona for Speedweeks (beginning with Tuesday’s practice session) carrying deserved optimism that 2022 can be even better.

The preseason media blitz has given him more time to bask in last season’s victory and boost his desire to become a back-to-back Daytona 500 champion. His mind-set is still improved. And NASCAR’s new Next Gen car is expected to balance out some of the power teams’ competitive advantages, potentially giving McDowell a chance to be even stronger at the famed 2½-mile tri-oval.

“I think that it levels the playing field everywhere,” McDowell said, “and so hopefully we won’t just be a one- or two-hit wonder.”