Michael McDowell Makes up Six Laps to Finish 13th at Atlanta
It won't supplant Bill Elliott's incredible rally in the May 1985 NASCAR Cup Series event at Talladega Superspeedway as the most impressive mid-race comeback of all time, but Michael McDowell pulled off a pretty incredible turnaround in Sunday's NASCAR Cup Series Ambetter Health 400 at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
After finding himself six laps down early in the race due to a mechanical issue, the native of Phoenix, AZ and his scrappy No. 71 Spire Motorsports team kept their head in the game, and by the time the checkered flag fell, the driver had miraculously finished 13th on the lead lap.
"Yeah, we lost six laps, but it worked out. We got them all back, and we had a chance to fight for a top 10 there on the last lap," McDowell said in an interview with Matt Weaver of Sportsnaut after the race. "Not the day we wanted, obviously, you want to be up front and racing all day long. But a great recovery and it was one of those grinding kind of days. And we come out of here with a solid finish and some points."
How did McDowell lose six laps? And more importantly, how was the tenacious racer able to make them all back up in order to give himself a fighting shot at a top 10 finish in the race?
McDowell started from the 24th position in Sunday's race but suffered an issue with the power steering system of his No. 71 Spire Motorsports Chevrolet while entering Turns 1 and 2 on Lap 37 of the 266-lap event.
After a near-collision in the middle of the pack due to his car washing up into the outside lane, it became apparent that his car was nearly impossible to handle in the pack with the lack of power steering.
"Glad that when the power steering hose came off, I didn't hit the wall. Because I was right in front of the pack, in the middle," McDowell told Racer's Kelly Crandall after the race. "[Shane van Gisbergen] did a great job of not turning me sideways, there, because it could have been the end of our day for sure."
McDowell dropped to the 39th position and rode around for several laps while his team devised a strategy to fix the ailments to his race car.
"Keep fighting for me," his crew chief Travis Peterson would say on the radio to encourage the driver to dig deep and nurse the car to the end of the Stage.
McDowell would lose connection with the draft of the cars in front of him around Lap 50 but was able to turn fast enough laps to hang onto the lead lap at the time of the end of Stage 1 at Lap 60.
Under the Stage caution, McDowell would take his car to pit road on Lap 64. The team would raise the hood up on his No. 71 Chevrolet, and a team member would radio, "We broke the line off of the top of the [power steering] pump. We need the pressure pump. We'll have to go back to the garage. We'll get it changed quick."
The team did get the pump changed quickly as McDowell only lost six laps in the process, but going six laps down is essentially a death sentence for any hopes of pulling off a decent finish in the NASCAR Cup Series.
As McDowell pulled back onto the race track on Lap 70, he confirmed that the power steering had been fixed, "Yep, all good. Everything is fine, all good," McDowell would state on the team radio.
At this point, you would imagine that the thought process for McDowell and his team would be to simply log laps and survive in the event that The Big One were to break out, and they could steal some spots and valuable points in the race's final running order. However, McDowell's crew chief Travis Peterson queued the team radio and told the driver that they were at this juncture in the race the only car one lap down, which put them in the free pass position, and if calamity on the track broke their way, they could find themselves getting back into contention.
By god, Peterson's words turned out to be prophetic.
Six cautions (four for on-track accidents, one for debris, and one for the Stage 2 break) over a 102-lap span in the middle portion of the race would allow McDowell to reach a historic mark. The driver had received six free passes, tying the all-time record for most free passes received in a single NASCAR Cup Series race, which was previously achieved by Jamie McMurray (at Talladega in 2014), and Noah Gragson (at the Bristol Dirt Race in 2022). More importantly, McDowell somehow found himself back on the lead lap heading into a restart on Lap 193.
The 40-year-old driver was happy everything lined up perfectly for him to gain laps back in six consecutive cautions.
"I think when you've been doing it long enough, when you have something happen early like that your hope is that nobody else loses a lap. Which, we were very fortunate that even when guys were losing laps, they lost more than we did. So, we got a ton of lucky dogs, which I'm thankful for," McDowell explained.
As McDowell lined up back on the lead lap for the first time since the opening Stage of the race, the action on track had reached fevered status as drivers and teams were attempting to position themselves for the mad dash for the win in the final Stage of the race. McDowell, who had not had the opportunity to get his car tuned up for battling within the fierce pack as had been focused on simply getting back into the picture, let the race come to him.
McDowell worked his way between the top 15 to the top 20 for the majority of the final Stage.
When a crash erupted on the backstretch on the final lap, McDowell was able to steer clear of the mess, and when he came back around to the checkered flag, the Spire Motorsports driver was incredibly credited with a 13th-place finish.
It looked like McDowell's hopes for a decent finish in the Ambetter Health 400 were all but over in the early laps of the race, but the driver and his team were determined to limit the amount of laps they lost to the field during repairs, and after the repairs when back on track. And in the end, they were able to make some magic happen.
"You're always hopeful, right? But it usually doesn't work out that way," McDowell said. "Normally, somebody will lose a lap or have a flat tire or something like that, and you just never get the opportunity to get the lucky dog. So, it just worked out well for us, and we capitalized on what could have been a really bad day."
Sure, he didn't win the race like Elliott did in 1985, and he didn't earn his laps back the old-fashioned way like Elliott did with the two-plus laps he was down in that vintage Talladega race, but what McDowell pulled off on Sunday at Atlanta was still very impressive, and quite noteworthy. And now, the solid superspeedway racer heads into another strength - road racing - this weekend at Circuit of the Americas coming off of a gutty comeback performance at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
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Toby Christie is the Editor-in-Chief of Racing America. He has 15 years of experience as a motorsports journalist and has been with Racing America since 2023.