Michael McDowell ‘not a fan’ of road course stage breaks

In the Next Gen era, Michael McDowell has turned into a very solid, if not elite, road course racer. But he’s not big on the stage breaks. Last season, NASCAR messed with the idea of not having stage breaks at road courses. Eventually, they went back on that ruling for the playoff race at the Roval.

In my opinion, the lack of stage breaks was great. It helped sort the races out where the fastest drivers were up front. They didn’t have to worry about manufactured restarts to bring the field back together.

Despite what fans and some drivers believe, NASCAR is back to having stage breaks on all road courses this season. Michael McDowell is not super happy about that ahead of COTA this weekend.

“The stage breaks, I’m not a fan of and that’s because I’m selfish and I want to be out front and leading laps and have nobody throwing a caution because it changes your strategy,” McDowell said on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. “We’ll adapt and we’ll overcome, it’s the same for everybody. We don’t love it because for us we end up giving up a tremendous amount of stage points so we can try to win the race, and that’s our goal at COTA we’re going to try to win the race.

“So, we’ll be pitting before the stage just like all the other guys up front and um, that’s not fun when you know that you’re leaving you know, 20 points on the table that you could use when it comes crunch time. But COTA is a great race track, it is a proper road course and our speed at road courses have been great. So, this is one that we’ve had circled and with the amount of speed we’ve had everywhere else we’re anticipating them to have the same amount of speed when we get to Austin.”