Clint Bowyer still has a shot at making the Chase for the Sprint Cup but for him to do so he needs to find consistency. And not the bad kind that he says has been following him around lately.
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[/media-credit]“That’s obviously the goal,” said Bowyer of making the Chase, “but just keep having crazy things happen. Had another good run going in Pocono last week and the radiator tab broke and the radiator fell out of the thing. I mean it’s just one crazy thing after another.”
Bowyer sits 12th in points, just outside the top 10 who guaranteed a spot in NASCAR’s postseason. He’s not safe in 11th or 12th, however, because of NASCAR’s new wildcard format, where drivers with victories who sit 11-20 in points would consist of the final two Chase spots.
Bowyer doesn’t have a win and therefore would be out of the Chase had it started this weekend. Luckily it doesn’t and there’s five more races ahead for Bowyer and his team to make a turnaround and either find victory lane for climb their way into Chase contention.
This weekend the series is in Watkins Glen for the second and final road course race of the season. Bowyer has never won a road course and has been on the wrong side of the chart at The Glen with his best finish being a ninth in 2009. It’s his only top 10 at the track where he’s finished 14th or worse in four of his five career starts there and he has yet to lead a lap.
Even so, Bowyer enters the weekend with confidence.
“Hopefully we can get a good run here,” Bowyer said on Friday. “We haven’t had a ton of luck here, broke a truck arm out of the car last year. I feel like this is the track where we can capitalize. This is the track out of any of these ones ahead of us that you can stand to gain or lose a lot of ground but you’ve got to look at this as an opportunity and try to gain as much ground as possible.”
Early this season it looked like Bowyer was going to have plenty of opportunities to gain ground in the Chase. He finished second in back-to-back weeks at Texas and Talladega where he nearly beat Jimmie Johnson to the finish line. Entering June Bowyer had led 253 laps and had seven top 10 finishes and two top fives.
Since then his No. 33 Cheerios team has been trying to dig themselves out of a hole. Bowyer has led just nine laps and his top 10 and top five finishes have only increased by one. Yet, he still only sits 41 points behind 10th place Dale Earnhardt Jr.
“Any gap is hard to overcome especially when you start getting up in that elite crowd,” Bowyer said. “The further up you go the harder it is to pass them. You just have to be able to capitalize on somebody’s mishap and that’s what it’s going to come down to. These teams are too good and things are too close in this sport right now to just overcome a huge spread in a short amount of time unless you have some help.”
According to Bowyer, Watkins Glen is the perfect track to be able to do that. Some consider it to be a wildcard of its own and that if a driver doesn’t take advantage of it then they’ll soon start feeling that time is quickly running out to make a Chase charge. No longer are there room for bad days and certainly not for Bowyer.
Behind him in points are three drivers with wins and one driver, Brad Keselowski, has two wins. It was aggressive strategy says Bowyer, which gave Keselowski his second win last weekend in Pocono. And whether it’s through strategy or moves on the track, aggression is something a driver will be fighting with over the next five weeks as they try to put themselves in Chase position.
“You just got to be careful,” said Bowyer. “You have to be careful but you have to be aggressive all at the same time. You got to be aggressive enough to make passes, to make bold passes but you’ve got to be careful enough to not dig yourself in a deeper hole than you are already in.The No. 2 car [Keselowski] winning that race last week was a pretty aggressive move.”
Bowyer thought the race at Pocono was over when it started raining and Joey Logano was leading. In fact, he said that most everyone thought it was over and the drivers headed back to their motorhomes. But, thank God for Keselowski as Bowyer said, it wasn’t and the Penske team was presented an opportunity they made the best of.
“Those are the aggressive calls you’ve got to take,” said Bowyer. “The hindsight of all of that would have been devastating for him and may have been the very move that kept him out of the top 20. It’s a gamble that you’ve got to be willing to take.”
Bowyer says his team have made those calls too but starting this weekend in Watkins Glen they’re hoping they start working out better than they have.
