Eldora Speedway
Familiar pattern, success for McDowell at Dream
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
Nick Hoffman (9) and Dale McDowell (17m) run midpack during the Dream. (joshjamesartwork.com)
ROSSBURG, Ohio (June 8) — Dale McDowell is nothing if not consistent in the Dream finale at Eldora Speedway.
Make the big race. Start deep in the field. Come on strong late in the distance. Finish near the front of the field.
Rinse. Repeat.
The tried-and-true pattern continued Saturday for the 60-year-old veteran from Chickamauga, Ga., whose 19th consecutive start in the crown jewel event’s 100-lap headliner ended with a fourth-place finish from the 16th starting spot. It was his ninth career top-five finish in the race — all coming since he began his current consecutive-start streak in 2008 — and marked the 17th time in those last 19 Dream runs that he’s taken the green flag in a double-digit starting position. | Complete Dream coverage
Starting 16th actually proved to even be too far forward for McDowell on this occasion. He added a further degree of difficulty to his outing by slipping as far back as 21st early in the distance, and when the feature’s first caution flag was displayed, on lap 42, he was mired in 19th.
Yet there he was in the closing stages of the race won by Bobby Pierce, cracking the top 10 on lap 65, reaching fifth for the first time on lap 80 and finally wrestling fourth away from Devin Moran on lap 97.
“At the start, Bobby just jetted on through there. I couldn’t go,” said McDowell, who took the green flag one row behind the 13th-starting Pierce. “We put some restrictors in (the engine) and had a little bit too much restrictor for the amount of traction that was out there (for the start of the race). It was about right at the end, but we just put too much in for early.”
But McDowell’s Team Zero Race Car fielded by his younger brother and crew chief, Shane, wasn’t quite right for the early conditions either. Which has become, well, a trademark of McDowell at Eldora.
“I mean, man, these cars are just better, or I’m better, or something’s better when the racetrack cleans up,” McDowell said. “When it’s dirty and it’s blowing stuff around, I just kind of hold my own or lose a couple of spots to some of them guys that are running really, really hard.
“So we would just kind of move forward, come back, move forward, come back. And then you have to have the cautions here to regroup, and fortunately we got some through the middle of the race.”
McDowell never climbed high enough to seriously threaten for his second career Dream victory, but he spent the final 21-lap stretch of green-flag racing battling for a top-five finish that he finally secured.
“Me and Devin and Ashton (Winger) and several others back there were swapping positions according to how we hit the corner and how much momentum we would carry into the corner,” McDowell said. “Didn’t have enough time to get up there, but we finished in one piece. The car was good. Clements motor ran flawlessly.”
McDowell just continues to be a force of nature at Eldora, where he might not be dominant (he has one win in both the Dream and World 100 in a combined 49 feature starts) but he’s seemingly also always lurking. He’s so steady, in fact, that he’s been running at the finish of the last 15 Dream finales dating back to his last DNF in 2011.
Nevertheless, McDowell understands that that he needs to find a way to pick up speed a little earlier in the century grind. But he also realizes that’s not an easy task for a driver so set in his ways as he is. He’s been trekking to Eldora’s big shows for three decades and altering his deep-seated tendencies for setups and driving style will take more than a few tweaks mechanically or mentally.
“Our whole deal is based around lap 70 to 100, and I got to figure out how to go a little earlier,” he said. “But it may be too late for that, right? It might be too late to teach an old dog new tricks.”
How many more shots McDowell will take at Eldora’s crown jewel trophies is also a question that’s on his mind less than one month since he celebrated his 60th birthday. He intimated again after his successful week at the Big E — he also finished third in Wednesday’s FloRacing Night in America 50-lapper and Friday’s 50-lap Dream preliminary feature — that his future remains year-to-year.
“Obviously, I want to win one of these things before I’m done,” said McDowell, whose Dream triumph came in 2014 (from the 22nd starting spot, of course). “But if I don’t, I think they said this is the 20th year or whatever in a row that I’ve made (the Dream), so that’s pretty awesome. And we’ll keep plugging. I don’t know if we’ll be back next year. Maybe so, we’ll see. We’ll figure it out.”
When it was suggested to McDowell that he’s far from done tackling Eldora considering the continued strength he shows, he smiled and offered a logical point of view.
“I don’t know, what’s better?” McDowell asked with a twinkle from his bright blue eyes. "To quit when you’re decent or when you don’t qualify?”
