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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
CUP: Bowyer Back On Track?
Clint Bowyer’s best Sprint Cup finish at Martinsville is fifth...
Tom Jensen  |  Posted March 28, 2010   Martinsville, VA
Clint Bowyer took a hit in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series points from 2nd to 12th place. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
The NASCAR Sprint Cup season is still early, just five races old in fact, with the sixth, the Goody’s Fast Pain Relief 500 at Martinsville Speedway postponed until Monday at noon, thanks to a rainout on Sunday.

But just because the season is still in its opening stretch doesn’t mean that these early races aren’t important. Far from it. Critical momentum can be gained or lost in these opening weeks, as teams try to establish agendas for the entire season.

No one knows that better than Clint Bowyer, driver of the No. 33 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet Impala. Last year, Bowyer suffered through a disappointing season, finishing 15th in points, his worst since his rookie season of 2006, when he was 17th. That knocked him out of the Chase for the first time three years, a fate that befell teammates Kevin Harvick and Jeff Burton as well.

The start of the 2010 season has been something else entirely for Bowyer. He began the year with an excellent fourth-place finish in the Daytona 500, always one of RCR’s better tracks, and followed it up with solid eighth-place runs in Southern California and Las Vegas.

Since then, though, Bowyer has struggled. He finished 23rd at Atlanta and then suffered a rare engine failure last week in Bristol. In the span of just two races, that dropped him from second in points to 12th.

All of which makes Monday’s race at Martinsville important, if not downright critical, even given how early in the year it is. After all, Martinsville is a track in the Chase for the Sprint Cup, plus it’s a place where Bowyer historically has struggled. Last year in this race, he finished fifth, his lone top-five finish in eight starts at the 0.526-mile oval.

With that in mind, Bowyer is eager to go racing. “I feel like we have gotten a lot better here and we closed that gap a bit and I feel like we could be strong,” he said of his prospects for the weekend. “We have to get things turned around and bounce back from engine failure last week and get ourselves a good finish.”

After seeing RCR shut out of the Chase in 2009, Bowyer is keenly aware of the pressures and expectations on the entire team to get all or at most of its cars back in this year.

“Well, you start out the season to win races and the second goal is to be a part of that Chase so that you have a chance to win the championship,” said Bowyer. “You can’t win the championship without being in that Chase and you have to be in it. So much goes into being in that Chase for your sponsors, for your outlook of the future, and everything.”

Making the Chase is a lynchpin for success at the Cup level, because it brings with millions of dollars of sponsor incentives and exposure during the final 10 races of the year.

“You have got to be in that Chase to be recognized, to be noticed, to be somebody in this sport so consistency along the way, not having engine failures like we had last week,” said Bowyer. “You have got to be able to put that stuff behind us early and be able to string together a long run of some solid top-tens and top-five finishes.”

And, of course, there’s still one the nagging blank spot on the team’s collective resume: RCR hasn’t won a points race since Oct. 2008. Bowyer thinks the key to finding victory lane again is simply to run well consistently.

“If you run in the top-five long enough, you are going to get yourself a win. Probably multiple wins,” he said. “We have got to get a little bit better. We have closed the gap a quite a bit from last year and we are really excited about the rest of the season. I feel like we have some good direction and have some good things coming in the future that will be even better this year.”

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEEDtv.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100 and e-mail him at Jensen is the author of “Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of Speed,” and has appeared on numerous television and radio shows. Jensen is the past President of the National Motorsports Press Association and an NMPA Writer of the Year.

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