Michael McDowell may only be in his second year at Spire Motorsports, but he was always meant to be an instant leader for the growth of its NASCAR Cup Series program.
That’s why team owner Jeff Dickerson brought McDowell into the fold in the first place.
So it should come as no surprise that McDowell was the driver pushing hardest behind the scenes at the team’s Mooresville, North Carolina shop last year. This season, McDowell has some help, all thanks to the addition of veteran racer Daniel Suárez.
MORE: Darlington schedule | Cup Series standings
Suárez is a two-time winner at the Cup level, in addition to winning the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series championship in 2016. McDowell lauds the experience Suárez brings to Spire after driving for several powerhouse teams throughout the Cup garage, adding further credibility to Spire’s stable in 2026. But what he appreciates most is Suárez’s competitive fire.
“He brings a level of intensity that is really refreshing for me here,” McDowell told NASCAR.com in a Wednesday phone interview. “Like last year, I felt like I was kind of that guy that was pushing on everything, right? Like you’re pushing to, not make changes, but just to make improvements and make things better. And now I’ve got somebody to help push with me.”
Suárez’s intensity was on full display post-race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on Sunday, when he and former Trackhouse Racing teammate Ross Chastain had a heated conversation after the race that led to an eventual shove from Chastain.
RELATED: Ross Chastain: ‘We just don’t get along’
It’s not the first time Suárez and Chastain have had a disagreement – but McDowell has also experienced an unhappy Suárez himself. McDowell mistakenly slowed Suárez’s lap during group qualifying at Phoenix Raceway in March 2019. Suárez sought out McDowell on pit road for a conversation that quickly escalated into a physical confrontation, with Suárez swinging McDowell to the pavement.
Seven years later, McDowell laughs at the memory because the two hardly knew each other before coming to blows that day. But through that moment grew a relationship Suárez called “very close” when recalling the scuffle in his Spire announcement in October 2025. Through going to the NASCAR hauler together, sitting down and having real conversations with one another, respect grew between the two fiery competitors – even if they wouldn’t be teammates until seven years later.
“What I learned through that process … is his level of intensity kind of matched mine, right?” McDowell said. “And I appreciated that and I liked that. I wasn’t worried about the altercation. It’s more like this guy’s kind of like me – he’s an idiot (laughing). And so him and I definitely got along a lot better after that, just kind of getting to know each other more. Like I said, that was sort of our first on-track issue, but also first off-track experience. And I appreciate the fight in him. And I don’t mean to use that word as fun, but like he’s just got that hunger, he’s got that fight and I feel like I do as well.”
There’s also a similar through line connecting the paths Suárez and McDowell took before arriving at Spire. After each spent years trying to establish stability in the Cup Series, both found landing spots at homes for at least half a decade: Suárez competed for Trackhouse for five seasons while McDowell spent seven racing with Front Row Motorsports. Transitioning to a new team has its obvious challenges, and because McDowell had just gone through that himself, he lent Suárez a guiding hand as Suárez took the reins of Spire’s No. 7 Chevrolet.
“I think it’s hard because you come in and you’re so used to how you’ve done it and how your team’s done it that you’re learning a lot of new people, and you’re learning a lot of new processes,” McDowell said. “Not only that, just where everything is. Who do you ask? And what do you do when you need to do this? I mean, it’s just things that you kind of take for granted that you’ve just done for so long that you don’t have to think about. I think that I’ve tried to help Daniel become quickly acclimated with how we do things here and tried to shorten that process so he didn’t have to figure it out on his own, and I think everybody at Spire’s done that.”
Suárez has shown few growing pains racing for his new group. In his first outing, Suárez posted a fourth-place finish in the exhibition Cook Out Clash at Bowman Gray Stadium. And through five points-paying races, Spire Motorsports’ three entrants are solidly lumped together in the points standings – and in contention for The Chase – with McDowell 14th, Carson Hocevar 15th and Suárez tied for 16th, each with one top-five finish and McDowell boasting a recent ninth-place finish at Phoenix on his tally.
“He’s fit in really well,” McDowell said of Suárez. “I think that’s probably what has and will continue to expedite that, he’s just fit in with our group really well. So it’s not so much him trying to figure out his role or figure out his place. I think he’s already found that pretty quickly, and I think everybody here has embraced that.”
“Daniel’s a Cup winner, and he’s a champion, right? And so I think that people sometimes forget that because it’s easy to get lost in the Cup Series, because there’s only a handful of guys winning every year, right? But he brings a lot of credibility and experience to our organization.”
