After forming an alliance late in the off-season, Circle-Sport Leavine Family Racing was working from behind at the beginning of the 2016 campaign. Since then, the team has built more cars, looking to build on their newly formed team.
With limited funding, ninth-year driver Michael McDowell currently sits 31st in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series standings, with a best finish of 15th in a second team car during the Daytona 500. The No. 95 car is coming off a 20th-place result at Dover this past Sunday.
The team doesn’t have the number of employees that a team such as Hendrick Motorsports, Joe Gibbs Racing or Richard Childress Racing – a team that they have a current alliance with. However, the team is said to full of racers with one common goal, improving on-track performance.
“The last few years, we ran a partial schedule, so getting more time to prepare and more time to build new cars and get cars ready [is the biggest difference],” McDowell told Speedway Digest of the biggest difference from running a full schedule. “The biggest thing is we’ve got more people working back at the shop.”
In the previous two seasons, McDowell ran a combined 35 races, while attempting 42 events with Leavine Family Racing. However, Circle Sport Racing has competed in a full-season for the last two years with two separate cars. This season, the two teams aligned, only putting one full-time car on the racetrack.
The team has 22 full-time employees based out of its race shop in Concord, N.C. But with nine chassis’ at the shop, it makes them go races at a time while using the same racecar.
“We need to utilize the resources that we currently have with more people, more engineering,” McDowell said of the team. “We need to be able to make our bodies better, our chassis lighter. A lot of times, we are just bolting them back together and going back to the racetrack.”
Whenever the team doesn’t have a race sold, Leavine Family Racing throws WRL General Contractors on the car, which is a construction company based in Flint, TX run by team owner Bob Levine. There are seven races remaining on the schedule that the No. 95 car does not have sponsorship for.
In order to gain more sponsorship, the team will need to come home with better finishes. Through 12 events this season, the No.95 team has two top-20 finishes, but has only finished outside 30th three times.
For a team that needs to prove on the track that it is worth investing in, it is hard with limited resources.
“How do you improve the performance without the money to do it?” McDowell asked himself. “We’re also in a situation where we don’t have the funds to improve it at the level we want to improve it at. It’s definitely a hard cycle, but the thing that we can do as a race team is we provide a great value to our partners.
“We’re at a price point that allows people to come into the sport that otherwise wouldn’t be able to come into the sport. Being a small team, we can give them a tremendous amount of support and attention.”
Joining the Chevrolet family over the off-season, the team leases engines from RCR. In doing so, it allows Ty Dillon to run five races with the team’s charter. In his last effort at Texas Motor Speedway, Dillon recorded a 20th-place finish. The 24-year-old has competed in three other events with Stewart-Haas Racing this year, replacing Tony Stewart when he was sidelined due to his back injury he suffered late in the off-season.
“The biggest help we’ve seen with that is just getting the support from RCR and being able to lean on them,” McDowell elaborated. “We’re still a ways behind them because we’re on a limited budget. We’re not able to bring brand new bodies and brand new racecars to the racetrack every week.”
Since NASCAR gave Circle-Sport Leavine Family Racing a charter prior to the 2016 season, it gives the team the knowledge that they will be a part of all 36 races, something they’ve never attempted. Over the team’s first five years of existence, it was a constant battle of having to qualify for races while attempting no more than 22 contests in 2014.
The charter system is new to the Cup Series in 2016. It mandates that 36 teams race the entire schedule with four spots available during qualifying. Originally, it was Joe Falk and Circle Sport Racing that received the charter from NASCAR, but teamed up with Levine Family Racing, granting the No. 95 entry into every race.
If the team runs out of sponsorship it is unknown what will happen to that charter. It may put NASCAR in a precarious situation and something that the sport has never seen before.
The biggest heartbreak for the company came in 2015, when there was a fire inside the team’s race shop, destroying many cars, tools and notebooks.
“The goal is always to be better at the end of the year than you were at the beginning of the year,” he said. “It’s tough to because normally you start the year off with new stuff, and as a small team, you’re not building brand new cars like everybody else.”
Leavine Family Racing has never finished higher than 37th in the standings, coming in 2014 when the team ran 19 events. Running the full schedule this year will allow the team to post a new record as an organization since it is competing for all 36 events.
For any organization with limited resources, it is a victory within itself to complete the entire schedule. With not a long off-season it is hard for a small team to find the funding it needs to take the next step.
On any given weekend the team may only receive so many tires because they simply don’t have money that all of the big teams do. During practice they may do runs at a time with the same tires, not showing the true potential out of the racecar.
If the team is able to gain sponsorship not only does it solve that problem, but it also will bring more focus to the race team. Any gain for the team during a weekend is a positive, but for this team it’s a morale boost and even gaining some momentum.
Whether or not Circle-Sport Leavine Family Racing is prepared to run a full year, is yet to be seen. If the team gets involved in a few scuffles on the racetrack, it will set back some of the gains that the team made back at the race shop. With only 22 employees on the staff, it is hard for a small team to regain what it once had. Spending time to repair a racecar is valuable time lost in preparing another.
Out of the 11 races that McDowell has competed in this season, he has seven top-30 results. He has never competed in a full 36-race season, nor will he this year, which is disappointing for the Arizona native. However, he’s not going to let that slow him down in his effort on the racetrack.
“Our goal and expectation is to be top 25 every weekend,” he said of the team. “Kansas is a perfect example. I think we finished 27th or 28th, but I was racing Jamie McMurray and Greg Biffle for 25th. People can’t even imagine what it’s like to run 25th. You’re racing really quality teams and drivers. That’s what is hard about this sport, managing partners expectations and owners expectations knowing what you have limited resources and still managing that and overachieving.”
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