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When Front Row Motorsports hired Michael McDowell to drive their No. 34 car in 2018, the idea was the then-journeyman driver would play a significant role in making the organization something it, to that point, had never been before.

Up to that point in its history, Front Row Motorsports grew gradually and modestly, but on very few occasions could claim to be a team capable of running at the front consistently or winning races -- save for happy occasions in 2013 and 2016, when they scored their first two wins in major upsets. At times in their first years together, it seemed difficult to see exactly how or if the growth they envisioned would ever happen -- particularly with McDowell, who had never truly been in a position to succeed in a Cup car.

But that growth has now happened, and it's happened in spades. Front Row Motorsports has won the Daytona 500 and they've won at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway with McDowell at the wheel. Those wins have made McDowell a playoff driver in two out of the last three seasons, with 26 of McDowell's 38 career top 10s coming since 2021 began. And that's not even accounting for the team's start to 2024, which included McDowell's first career pole at Atlanta, the outside pole for the Daytona 500, and poise at the front of the pack unlike what the team has ever shown before through becoming a Tier 1 team at Ford Performance and forming a technical alliance with Team Penske.

That poses a fairly straightforward question for McDowell: Is this what he, team owner Bob Jenkins, and general manager Jerry Freeze envisioned when they joined forces some six years ago?

"I hope so," McDowell laughed when posed that question by CBS Sports. "My thought moving to Front Row and the opportunity that I had was even though I'd been in the sport a long time and had a decent amount of experience, it wasn't in cars that were capable of winning races. And so for us, it was all about how do we build the team and the program to the point where we have what we need to go out there and contend and be a legitimate frontrunner. 

"And it was a slow growth and a slow process, but we were doing it at the rate that we could sustain from a business standpoint. ... And then be able to actually put processes in place and work things slowly and try to get to where we wanted to be. I think if you ask Bob and Jerry, it's taken us longer than we've wanted. But the goal was always the same. The goal was always to put ourselves in position to be a frontrunner and to win races and to challenge for wins."

In an era of NASCAR where team-building feels like less of a fanciful idea and more of a distinct possibility -- particularly as disruptors like Trackhouse Racing and 23XI Racing have quickly become challengers to the established order of Hendrick, Penske and Gibbs -- Front Row's performance to start the year has both proven revealing by itself and reinforced what the team has become over the past several seasons. Atlanta marked a banner weekend for the team in particular with McDowell winning the pole and their two cars leading 85 of 260 laps -- an all-time single-race mark for the team, which included Todd Gilliland leading a race-high 58 laps -- and McDowell finishing ninth.

Front Row cars running well is no longer a surprise, and wins by McDowell are no longer upsets -- he was dominant in his win at Indianapolis last year, starting fourth and leading 54 of 82 laps on his way to victory. Getting the team to that point has not necessarily been an easy process, nor has it been quick. However, it has made goals that were completely grandiose at many points in company history now seem perfectly possible.

"I think the last few years has definitely helped us, internally with the team, and all the people that work at Front Row from top to bottom realize that we're pretty close," McDowell said. "We're getting there. And if we keep the foot down and we keep working on all the things that we know we can still work on. And there's a lot of areas for growth for us, and we still know that, and we covered some of those gaps this offseason, and we're starting to get some of the tools and the equipment in that we need to really make those final steps.

"The expectations are high, but the expectations I also feel like are not unrealistic. I mean, the fact of the matter is that it's super challenging to win in the Cup Series. The races are so long, the competition's so great that you have to not just have fast cars, but you also have to execute perfectly in order to do it. And so it's not an easy thing to just throw out there that, 'Oh, we're gonna win races this year, we're gonna get both cars into the playoffs.' It's tough. You see a lot of great organizations that have struggled to do that. But we feel like we have the people and we have everything in place to do that if we go out there and do our jobs well."

In McDowell's estimation -- and though he cautioned that the team isn't quite where it needs to be yet -- Front Row Motorsports has the potential to become a championship contender. The team's expanded partnership with Ford and new technical alliance with Penske should help greatly to that end, as should the sponsorships McDowell and his team have acquired -- including with Famous Toastery, a Charlotte-based breakfast chain that recently extended its partnership with the 2021 Daytona 500 champion.

"For me, it's more of a family partnership because we've been customers for a long time there and really enjoy going to Famous Toastery, and we have as a family for a long time," McDowell said. "It's a cool partnership because it came together very organically just being around and being in the restaurant often and just getting to know everybody. And as they're growing and expanding their brand and trying to branch out with new franchisees and new markets, it was a great way for us to work together and build that brand together. And they're helping build my brand too, which is great."

Given their start to the season, McDowell said the goal for Front Row Motorsports was to keep up its momentum and speed from the first two weeks of the season into the two-week stretch of races on the West Coast. That got off to an uneven start last week at Las Vegas, when McDowell led four laps on strategy but ultimately finished 25th, just behind teammate Gilliland in 24th. However, the team now has a trip to Phoenix to look forward to after a ninth-place finish by McDowell in last year's season-finale, a notable feat given where the Phoenix native has been in his career and the point he has now reached.

In McDowell's days of driving start-and-park cars, and even later on when he was running from start to finish in back-marker cars, his homecoming trips to Phoenix offered little opportunity to put on a good performance for family and local fans, and the very notion of running well or even winning was an outright impossibility. Now, there is far more of a sliver of hope for McDowell that he can be competitive at Phoenix, which has greatly changed the way he anticipates and approaches race weekend at his home track.

"10 years ago, winning at Phoenix was never a dream. I couldn't even see that being a possibility. And now it truly is a possibility," McDowell said. "It's fun to be able to go there and have high expectations and run well and see the fans pumped for you. We have such great fans in Phoenix -- I think everybody says that, but when you look at the campground and you look at the stands, it is a packed house. To be a local driver and represent The Valley is something that is fun and it's an honor. Now that we're running good, it's even better.

"Winning races and running well always helps everything. We've just got to keep that going."