Michael McDowell sits 23rd in the NASCAR Cup Series standings heading into what he describes as a good race track for him at the Kentucky Speedway on Sunday. McDowell, says that his car had great speed last year and with his car having even more speed so far this season, his confidence is through the roof right now.

“Kentucky has, I don’t want to say historically, but historically has been a night time race from what I can remember, so a midday race is gonna be hot and slick and should make for some good racing,” said the Arizona native prior to Sunday’s Quaker State 400 (2:30 p.m. ET, FS1, PRN). “I’m looking forward to it.  It was a good race for us last year in regards to speed.

“We had a lot of speed and I made a mistake on pit road and took us out of a good shot of having a solid finish, so we’re looking to redeem ourselves this year at Kentucky and we’ve been looking forward to this weekend just because of the fact we had so much speed there last year and was probably one of the best racetracks that we had last year.”

McDowell, notes that his No. 34 Ford for Front Row Motorsports has never shown this much speed before. He’s scored two top 10 finishes in his last three starts on the season. These are his first top 10 finishes on a non superspeedway track before. He’s also had four top 15 finishes in his last six tries overall too.

“Our cars have had more speed this year than we’ve ever had at Front Row, so that’s helped us, obviously, with performance and getting the results that we need to get,” McDowell continued. “But they’ve done an exceptional job unloading really close without any practice and having our cars very competitive, which is hard to do.”

McDowell, though says that some mechanical failures earlier in the year has set them back. Right now, while they’re 23rd in the drivers standings, they’re 25th in the owners standings. That means he’s one spot, or six points now, away from being in the top 24 which means he’d start in the top 24 too.

“For the most part we’ve been starting 26^th, 27^th, 30^th, 32^nd every weekend, so that’s tough,” McDowell noted. “We’re only a handful of points out of the top 24 in owner points, so it would be nice to get there.”

If McDowell wants to get into the top 24, he’d have to pass his teammate John Hunter Nemechek in doing so. That’s difficult for him because the goal for FRM would be to have both in the top 24.

“The unfortunate part is that my teammate is the next one in front of us, so we’d like to have both cars in the top 24 in owner points so that we can both start up front and I think we’re maybe 10 or 12 points back from that, so it’s not impossible but we’ve got some work to do,” the Arizona native noted on getting both cars into the top 24. “If we keep running how we’ve been running the last three or four weeks we should be able to get ourselves in there and not have to start so far back.”

McDowell, says he’s impressed with his rookie teammate and that both drivers are pushing each other to get faster and the most of out of their race cars. But, he also says that the performance gains out of FRM isn’t necessarily from Nemechek but rather the improvements the team has made over the last couple of seasons finally starting to show.

“I mean, he’s going great,” McDowell said of Nemechek. “He’s ahead of me in points and has been running very well, but a lot of this sport is timing and we’ve been slowly building this program over a long time, but for me the last three years and we started to see that at the end of last year and we started to make some decent improvements and then this year everything has just come full circle and we’ve really improved all the cars and people and processes, so I think he’s getting the benefit of three, four, five, six, seven years of a lot of people’s hard work, but he’s doing a good job making the most out of it and executing.

“That’s not to take anything away from him, but John Hunter didn’t bring this speed to Front Row.  Front Row was building that over years and he’s very fortunate that he’s got the opportunity this year while the cars are so good, just like I am.

“I’m so excited to be contending for top 10s and top 15s, but it wasn’t always like that.  I feel for David Ragan and Matt Tifft and those guys, and David Gilliland, that were grinding it out when it wasn’t that much fun and we weren’t that competitive.  It’s a team effort, no doubt about it.  Seth Barbour, his crew chief, has been with the organization for a long time and has done a great job of elevating it, alongside with Drew and Derrick Finley and a lot of people, so I think that this sport, like I said, it’s a lot about timing and his timing is really good right now to be in our cars and have them running as well as they are.”

His crew chief, Drew Blickensderfer, says that there’s a number of things to the increase in performance of the team this year.

“It’s a lot of things, to be honest with you,” Blickensderfer said. “Whenever you get better in this sport you very rarely can put your finger on one thing.  It’s not one crew chief.  It’s not one crew member.  It’s not one driver, it’s a few things and when we went from three to two teams at Front Row, we were able to kind of cherry pick and although losing the funding from the 36 car and things like that in the organization hurts, as two teams now we were able to take guys off of that 36 to possibly make our team stronger, either engineers, crew members, so I think the two teams, the guys that build the cars and go to the racetrack on the cars are better than they’ve ever been at Front Row.”

Blickensderfer, says the team owner has spent more and more money each year with their alliance with Roush Fenway to get better and that’s a huge testament to what’s going on.

“Bob Jenkins has done a great job every single year of making small improvements to the quality of products we get from Roush Fenway Racing,” he continued. “We’ve had a longtime relationship with them and every year he spends a little more money to get a little more updated and have similar cars to the 6 and the 17, and this year we are as close as we have ever been and probably about as close as you can be to having the same cars as was coming out of their facility, and that’s not only the bodies, but the parts and pieces we put on the car as well.  So, I think we have a better product.  I think we have stronger teams, and that gives a confidence in the race car drivers that we’re not gonna battle our butts off to try to stay on the lead lap, we’re gonna battle against guys who are spending two or three times more than us for top 15s, and I think both John Hunter and Michael have been able to do that or the majority of the year.”