Michael McDowell Charges to Spire Motorsports' First-Ever Pole
Michael McDowell, who had never won a NASCAR Cup Series pole position prior to the 2024 season, took his seventh career pole Saturday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, marking the 40-year-old driver's first pole position through the 2025 season's opening five races.
The driver of the No. 71 Spire Motorsports Chevrolet turned a fast lap of 28.883 seconds (186.961 mph) in the qualifying session, which secured the pole position over Joey Logano by a margin of 0.015 seconds.
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McDowell's latest pole was won by incredible speed that he was able to maintain through Turns 3 and 4.
"Well, this is where I always say being the student and studying matters," McDowell said in his pole-winner press conference. "You know, Christopher Bell last year in Round 2, just kept it a little bit lower in Turn 4, and that is how he was able to get the pole. And so, when my car went through [Turns] 1 and 2, and it had a lot of grip, and I didn't feel like I had used it all up, I knew that I had an opportunity to potentially do that without scrubbing speed."
McDowell studying last year's qualifying session at the 1.5-mile speedway, paid off in a pole position.
McDowell, who enters this weekend 15th in the championship standings, will look to score his third career NASCAR Cup Series win, and first since moving to Spire Motorsports in the offseason after a seven-year stint with Front Row Motorsports.
The pole-winning run was a moment Spire Motorsports had been waiting on since the team's inception in 2019. On Saturday, March 15, 2025, the team officially won its first pole position in NASCAR Cup Series competition. But anyone who has been paying attention to qualifying this season, likely saw the Spire Motorsports coming a mile away.
"Anytime you're building positive momentum, it's great in our sport. And it does matter, all of it matters," McDowell stated. "And last week was good for that, too. We got all three cars in the top-10. The race didn't go well, two of our guys crashed in the same crash, so that's no fun. And we had to go to the back with the steering rack change we made, and we ended up cutting a tire, and that kind of ended our day."
Logano, who started second last weekend at Phoenix Raceway, suffered the same fate this weekend at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, but the driver of the No. 22 Team Penske Ford Mustang Dark Horse will be in a good position to chase after his first top-10 finish of the season.
Austin Cindric, Logano's Team Penske teammate, will roll from the starting grid in the third position, and he'll be joined in Row 2 by Richard Childress Racing's Kyle Busch. Busch, a Las Vegas native, is looking to snap a 61-race winless drought this weekend at his hometrack.
Erik Jones nabbed the fifth starting spot in the No. 43 LEGACY MOTOR CLUB Toyota Camry XSE, while Alex Bowman, Josh Berry, William Byron, Zane Smith, and Kyle Larson rounded out the top-10 qualifiers for Sunday's Pennzoil 400.
Christopher Bell, who will look to capture a fourth-consecutive NASCAR Cup Series win on Sunday will look to do it from the 13th starting spot.
Ryan Blaney was relegated to a last-place starting spot after he was unable to turn a lap in Saturday's qualifying session. The driver of the No. 12 Team Penske Ford Mustang Dark Horse spun in Turn 2 during Saturday's practice session, and backed into the outside wall, causing damage to his race car.
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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.