Michael McDowell delivers Victory of a Lifetime in 500 win for FRM

It took a massive wreck, a near six-hour rain delay, a battle to be won with fog, but nonetheless it put the No. 34 Loves Travel Stops car in the right position.

Michael McDowell is the Daytona 500 champion.

Coming off of a year where the unexpected became the ordinary and NASCAR became one of the first sports to try and return to ‘a new normal,’ it’s fitting ’21 started with an upset that will be long remembered.

“I always knew that if you just kept grinding that one day everything will line up and it will go right,” McDowell said after capturing his first win in over 300 starts in NASCAR. “But as you get further into it, you just don’t know.”

Not only was it McDowell’s first win, but Sunday was the first time he had finished in the top five in a NASCAR Cup Series race since Talladega in 2019.

All four of the top-five finishes he has came at superspeedways. It just goes to show how big of an upset him putting that car in victory lane was.

For his team at Front Row Motorsports, the victory was their third time winning a cup race, ever, and getting this one on Sunday was a significant break for a smaller group like them.

“It means everything,” Front Row Motorsports General Manager Jerry Freeze said. “It means everything to us. I think Drew said it best; we’re a team that incrementally gets a little bit better each and every year, and that’s basically the mandate that (team owner) Bob Jenkins puts on us. What are we going to do to get better next year?”

NASCAR does not, anymore, publish purse winnings from each race for the public to consume, but its estimated that this win will profit FRM somewhere around $2 million. 

It’s breaks like that that could help the team to reach for higher goals in the series than winning a race every now and then.

That’s something that race winning crew chief Drew Blickensderfer considered when leaving Richard Petty Motorsports to team up with McDowell. 

“We’ve kind of taken the initiative of, hey, our cars are getting better, we’re getting better at mile-and-a-halfs, we’re getting better at short tracks, our speedway cars are getting better, Front Row is building,” Blickensderfer said. 

It may not result in another win this season for the team, and it may be awhile before they really make another big impact on things, but make no mistake – this team is growing and this is a major step.

Next up, is what they do with it. 

The NASCAR Cup Series returns to the track on Sunday, February 21 as it takes to the Daytona road course for its second race of the season. The race is scheduled to kick off at 2:00 p.m. CT on FOX.