Michael McDowell: If Chase Elliott Has Trouble Winning, Imagine Being Us

Ranked 22nd in the NASCAR Cup Series standings, Michael McDowell has not enjoyed the type of debut season at Spire Motorsports that he had in mind.

While 2025 hasn’t been all bad for the veteran driver who made the offseason switch from Front Row Motorsports to Spire, he quite simply hasn’t lived up to his own expectations.

And with that, McDowell finds himself in a win-or-bust type of situation, knowing that a trip to Victory Lane in the final weeks of the regular season is likely his only ticket into the Cup Series playoffs.

Although McDowell acknowledges that several factors have played a role in his struggles this year, he believes there’s one main obstacle standing in the way of a post-race celebration.

For Michael McDowell, The Stars Have Just Not Aligned In 2025

With a pair of top-10 finishes in the season’s first half, including a season-best fifth-place finish last month on the Mexico City road course, Michael McDowell has — at least sporadically — carried enough speed in his No. 71 Chevrolet to contend for wins.

And even in some races when he didn’t finish all that well, McDowell had a car that was plenty fast. For example, he led 10 laps in the April race at Talladega Superspeedway before finishing 11th.

The following race, at Texas Motor Speedway, McDowell paced the field for 19 laps and was out front with less than 10 laps to go before a late-race crash derailed him.

So, the problem for McDowell this year hasn’t always been the handling, horsepower or balance in his race cars. He’s had all of it at times. But on those occasions, other factors have kept him out of Victory Lane.

“I feel like we have had more ups and downs than we had wanted to, but I also feel like our cars have potential and have speed,” McDowell said on Saturday at the Chicago Street Course, where he qualified on the outside of Row 1 for Sunday’s race. “When we finish with no problems, we typically finish in the top 10 and are in contention. Or we’ve been in the 30s.

“That has been the struggle this year. We have had a decent amount of mechanical issues, we have had a decent amount of random season racing stuff where you make a mistake or something happens. But on the races where we execute and everything goes pretty well, I feel like we are in that top 10 contention. … I feel like our speed has been there to contend, but there is still a lot to clean up.”

So, What’s Been The Single Biggest Barrier Between Michael McDowell And Winning?

Even though Michael McDowell acknowledges that there’s plenty he and Spire Motorsports can do better, he’s convinced his dearth of wins is, more than anything, simply a by-product of the competitive nature of NASCAR’s premier series.

He noted on Saturday in Chicago that even a driver like 2020 NASCAR Cup Series champion Chase Elliott, who last weekend in Atlanta finally ended a 44-race drought, has struggled to close the deal in races.

“It’s hard,” McDowell said. “It’s hard for the No. 9 car of Chase Elliott and Hendrick Motorsports to win Cup races. Could you imagine how hard it is for the (No.) 71 team to win races?”

McDowell makes a reasonable point. If Elliott — who has all the backing of an elite organization like Hendrick Motorsports behind him — can struggle to finish P1, anyone can. And most teams in the NASCAR Cup Series garage likely will for the foreseeable future.

McDowell and his Spire Motorsports bunch are among that group.

“It’s tough,” McDowell said. “And this is a tough sport. You have to have everything go your way. It’s not easy.”