Hunting For A Win
CORNELIUS, N.C. — The NASCAR Sprint Cup Series travels to Texas Motor Speedway for a trip around one of the biggest and fastest tracks on the circuit.
It’s also hunting season and as most know, it’s one of Clint Bowyer’s favorite times of the year. In fact, before visiting the 1.5-mile oval Bowyer will spend a little time in camouflage. He will trade in the camo attire for his 5-hour ENERGY firesuit on Friday riding momentum after two weeks of top 10 finishes.
At Talladega he finished third and last weekend at Martinsville he had another shot at a win when he started fourth during a green-white-checkered restart. Unfortunately, he got hung in the high line during the final laps but still managed to finish seventh.
He carries that momentum into Texas where Bowyer has finished in the top 10 in six of the last eight races, including an eighth-place finish at the Ft. Worth track back in April.
And while Bowyer may be hunting game during the week, this weekend he is hunting something else to go on his mantle, a trophy from victory lane.
How do you approach the closing races of this season?
“For us it’s more of an organization deal, not just a team thing. We’ve got to figure out how to collectively get better with both cars. We’ve got a lot of areas that we can improve on. It’s easy to point fingers on a lot of big areas that you think, but in all honesty in this sport and in this garage it’s the little things that make up the difference. There’s clearly a lot of things we have to get better at.”
Is there a different approach to these races knowing the team will have a new car and new rules for 2015?
“To be honest, that’s a good thing for me. It’s quite obvious that we missed the mark on this car for this year. The best thing that I can see is the light at the end of the tunnel is a completely different animal — starting from scratch again next year with a new car and new rules and everything else. Hopefully, we can be a lot better to the punch line at the beginning of the year than we were and not have to play catch up all season long like we’ve been.”
CHASSIS
Chassis No. 813 serves as the primary chassis for Bowyer at Texas. This chassis raced at Dover in September (9th) Michigan in August (6th), June (10th) and Charlotte in May (17th). Chassis No. 800 serves as the back-up chassis and raced at Bristol in August (17th), Kentucky in July (23rd) and Dover in June (4th).
TEXAS STATS
· Three top-five and 10 top-10 finishes in 17 starts
· Completed 5,670 of 5,695 laps (99.6%) and has led 85 laps
· Average start 15.0 and average finish 12.5
· One DNF (did not finish) –
