Alex Bowman focuses at the task at hand for Snday’s YellaWood 500 at Talladega Superspeedway. (Photo: Hayden Hutchison | The Podium Finish)
LINCOLN, Ala. — Alex Bowman may have his work cut out for him ahead of Sunday’s YellaWood 500 at Talladega Superspeedway (2 p.m. ET on NBC, MRN Radio and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio 90).
Rolling off from the 23rd position, Bowman will not have to look too hard for drafting partners like Chase Elliott, Kyle Larson and William Byron, his Hendrick Motorsports teammates, who start 11th, 12th and 16th. Unlike past races at the 2.66-mile superspeedway, Hendrick’s quartet did not showcase their usual qualifying trim specialty.
Perhaps focusing more on race trim than qualifying pace, Bowman, as any driver attests, does not have to worry too much about starting position with drafting being a powerful factor with marching toward the front.
Beyond qualifying midfield, the Tucson, Arizona, native enters the 188-lap race with an average finish of 9.5 in the opening four races of the Playoffs.
“It’s been a good four weeks for us,” Bowman said to Holly Cain of NASCAR Wire Services. “We have a long way to go though. We just need to keep executing at a high level. I certainly know that we’re capable of it and I know that I’m capable of it. We just have a long way to go and we need to keep it up.”
Kicking the Playoffs with a fifth at Atlanta, despite placing 18th at Watkins Glen, Bowman tallied a ninth at Bristol before finishing sixth last Sunday at Kansas. Like the 11 other combatants, the No. 48 Ally Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 team has elevated their craft in the postseason in the midst of the frantic Round of 12.
“We have been OK, for sure,” he said in a team press release. “We have had better pace in the Playoffs than where we were prior, and it’s made my job a little easier. So, yeah, we are not perfect by any means, and we have got a lot of things we need to improve on.
“We are kind of headed in the right direction right now and doing the right things. Talladega is certainly the wild card of this round so hopefully we can continue this positive momentum and come out on the good side of it.”
Alex Bowman reviews data during Saturday’s qualifying session for the YellaWood 500 at Talladega Superspeedway. (Photo: Hayden Hutchison | The Podium Finish)
In 17 starts, Bowman has two top fives and five top 10 finishes, including a fifth place finish in the series’ most recent visit to Talladega on Apr. 21. His best career finish at ‘The World’s Fastest Superspeedway’ is a runner-up in the 2019 spring race.
Races at Talladega are unpredictable with the draft and different strategies for drivers and teams focused on scoring stage points versus setting up for the best position in the closing laps. Couple those factors along with the advent of fuel mileage tactics and it makes for a stock car equivalent of chess while being inches apart on a high banked track.
“It’s changed, The way you used to build runs and you could move around and get through the field when you wanted to get track position, that’s really gone away now,” Bowman said in his Saturday media scrum. “It’s a lot of trying to maintain your track position while saving fuel to have the fastest pit stop.”
Drivers often flock for their OEM or organizational teammates in the opening stanzas of a superspeedway race, uniting in numbers all in the name of track position. It is not so simple for Bowman and his peers to not only line up together, but to discard the slower pace prevalent in the opening laps of Stages 1 and 2 at superspeedway races.
“Unfortunately, I’ve seen some fans be like, ‘Well, you should just run hard.’ And if you just run, you’re gonna be beat by the guys who didn’t,” Bowman opined. “We’re all just trying to run the best we can which translates to not running very hard at times which is kind of just changing intensity. So, I think you’ve seen speedway races like that all year, and it’ll probably be more of the same.”
While Sunday’s race may resemble the season’s five superspeedway races, it does not mean Bowman’s effort will be any less than it would be if it were the DAYTONA 500. If anything, the middle race of the Round of 12 means just as much intensity for the methodical racer.
“I would say stage ends are going to be more aggressive, more meaningful,” he considered. “Other than that, I think it’s going to look the same. For all of us, it means more, but we’re 10 10s every week. It’s not like when it’s a Playoff race, we’re not trying hard. It’ll look similar, just a little more intense at the end of the stages.”
