HAMPTON, Ga. – There’s nothing like underdogs during a tournament. Whether it’s March Madness or the Stanley Cup Playoffs, a knockout-style format always offers fans some sleepers to support, and the debut of NASCAR’s In-Season Challenge this weekend at EchoPark Speedway is no different.
Two such underdogs entering the 32-driver tournament are Spire Motorsports’ Michael McDowell and Kaulig Racing’s AJ Allmendinger.
The pair of drivers will face off in the first round in Atlanta Saturday night (7 ET, TNT Sports/truTV, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) as the 11th and 22nd seeds, respectively. While both have shown their strengths on drafting-style tracks, the next two weekends will be their bread and butter with the Chicago Street Course and Sonoma Raceway on the horizon.
Only one of them will remain in the In-Season Challenge after Atlanta, and whoever is the winner will have a golden chance for a “Cinderella” run in the tournament.
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“Honestly, I wish I wasn’t matched up against him here because this is a good track for him,” McDowell said. “Obviously, it’s a good track for us too, but I think that his strengths and his tracks line up on my strengths and my tracks too so either way, one of us will make a lot of noise.”
McDowell, a two-time Cup winner with both coming at a superspeedway (Daytona, 2021) and a road course (Indianapolis, 2023), earned the higher seed after a top-five run in Mexico City. The 40-year-old mainstay scored a pair of top fives last year at Sonoma and Chicago, which will make him a serious threat to advance all the way to the semifinals that will take place at Dover Motor Speedway next month.
On the other end, Allmendinger doesn’t love his Chicago numbers — finishes of 17th and 38th in his two starts on the street course through Grant Park — but his three Cup wins have all come on road courses (Watkins Glen, Indianapolis, Charlotte Roval) and the No. 16 Chevrolet is always in the mix when the circuit shifts to left and right-turn venues.
Allmendinger says he won’t be thinking about McDowell until the checkered flag, with the style of racing Atlanta offers, as they’ll see each other plenty during the 400-miler.
“I think people are probably begging that I beat McDowell in it right now,” Allmendinger jokingly said about his Chicago stats. “It’s fun. It’s gonna be interesting. This race is unique, right? Because you can’t look at that during the race, because we’re gonna pass each other 100 times during the race if nothing happens. So it’s not like you kind of base it off of like, ‘oh, he’s struggling’ or I’m struggling on speed. But, yeah, I think if you ask us both and we’re standing next to each other, we know that whoever takes the other person out of the first round, it helps themselves a lot for the next couple.”
Allmendinger also noted that there’s a lot of great road-course drivers in the Cup Series so there’s no guarantee either he or McDowell will make a deep run, but Allmendinger is enjoying the talk and all the buildup for the In-Season Challenge while also focusing on the task at hand at winning his way into the Cup Playoffs Saturday evening.
“It’s a fun little tournament that NASCAR’s put on and I think the drivers are gonna enjoy,” Allmendinger said. “It’s just this race, you can’t think about it because it’s a superspeedway race, so you’re gonna have a lot that happens throughout this race.”