NASCAR Cup veteran driver Michael McDowell has become one of the better superspeedway drivers in the NASCAR Cup Series in recent years.
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That includes his surprise win in the 2021 Daytona 500, plus three top-five and eight top-10 finishes at Daytona, as well as three top-five and four top-10 finishes at this weekend’s venue, Talladega Superspeedway.
Superspeedway racing is unlike competing on most other types of racetracks, such as short tracks or intermediates.
But superspeedway racing has one similarity to non-oval tracks such as road courses and street courses, namely, drivers, crew chiefs, and teams have to be more astute at saving fuel across Daytona’s 200 laps or Talladega’s 188 laps (both not including potential overtime, which further exacerbates late-race fuel mileage issues).
During his media availability Saturday at ‘Dega, McDowell stressed the balancing act he must endure between putting the pedal to the metal, yet also being astute at the need to save fuel.
“Fuel mileage is here to stay, there’s just no way around it,” the 40-year-old McDowell said. “You can look at it a lot of different ways. But the fact of the matter is that if you can shorten up your pit stop, it’s going to gain you track position later, it just is.”
Caution flags compound fuel mileage strategy further, of which there typically are quite a few at Talladega and Daytona, especially oftentimes several multi-vehicle ‘Big Ones’ within the same race.
If there are several cautions, it helps save fuel mileage by default. But to gain as much of an advantage as they can in the later stages of races, teams oftentimes short-pit during late cautions, meaning they don’t fill fuel cells completely. This lightens the weight of the car, allowing it to go faster.
But that’s also a big compromise if situations arise later that impact fuel mileage limitations even more.
“It always just depends on where those cautions fall,” McDowell added. “But you still go into it with the mindset of ‘I want track position, I want to be in control of the race, but I don’t want to use more fuel than everybody else. And so it’s this constant battle of are you using too much or if you’re not.”
Sometimes Fuel Mileage Strategy Works and Other Times It Doesn’t
McDowell’s 2021 win at Daytona is a perfect example of astute fuel mileage management. While other teams gambled late in the race, only to run out of fuel or need to make late fuel stops, McDowell’s Front Row Motorsports team (at the time, he races for Spire Motorsports now) thought otherwise.
“I’ve seen the plan burn you, where you just commit to, ‘Hey, I’m going to save fuel.’ Last year (the spring race at Talladega), actually, I got into a place where I lost track position. I said, ‘I don’t care, I’ve just got to get back to the front. I was probably the only one wide open, but got back to the front.”
“And then as soon as I got back to the front, I started saving. So it is a part of what we do. I don’t see that changing. Then those last 25 laps, everybody was hammer down. Nobody’s saving. So I don’t think we’re going to get away from that. And even if we did, we’re all still going to be packed together. That’s not going to change,” elaborated the 40-year-old.
But still, Sunday’s race will be dictated by track position, the number of fuel-saving cautions, frequency of pit stops, and, of course, the inevitability of how many big wrecks there.
“I hope it’s not like that all day long and everybody’s saving fuel,” McDowell said. “But the one thing about our sport and about these races is it’s constantly evolving. And I think the fuel mileage part of it is that. … “You study it and you examine it and you’ve got to be really good at it to execute a perfect race. It’s just the evolution of where we’re at.”
