CHICAGO — NASCAR driver Alex Bowman spent his 30th birthday in an Iowa hospital after breaking his back in a crash during a sprint car race on a short track, which is not his day job with Hendrick Motorsports.
Feeling as if he had let everyone down, it was a tough moment.
That was just last year, but it seemed like a long time ago Sunday night.
Bowman is a Cup Series winner once again after he held off Tyler Reddick in the rain-shortened Grant Park 165 on a wet street course in downtown Chicago. It was his first victory since March 2022 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, stopping an 80-race drought without a victory.
“There’s a lot of emotions that go away with this because of how hard that has been,” Bowman said.
With his eighth career win on the top-tier Cup Series, Bowman became the last of the four Hendrick Motorsports drivers to secure a playoff spot this season, joining former champions Chase Elliott (2020) and Kyle Larson (2021) along with William Byron. The 26-year-old Byron has followed his victory at the season-opening Daytona 500 with two more wins, by the second race Larson had his first of what are now three victories, and Elliott ended his own long skid when he won in mid-April.
Bowman became the 12th driver to win a Cup Series points race this year, leaving four playoff berths available with six races left in the regular season. It was the first Cup Series win for Blake Harris, who took over as Bowman’s crew chief in the No. 48 Chevrolet before the 2023 season.
Bowman has 11 top-10 finishes this year, but his winless skid had ramped up speculation about his future at Hendrick. That all seems to have gone away now.
“I understand why people want to talk. … It’s a tough business,” said Jeff Gordon, a Hendrick executive who won four Cup Series championships as a driver and is in the NASCAR Hall of Fame. “When you’re at Hendrick Motorsports, you do expect, especially when the other three have won, to be in that same category, and it hasn’t been happening. Hopefully this dispels a lot of the rumors.”
AP photo by Erin Hooley / Hendrick Motorsports driver Alex Bowman hugs teammates after winning Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race in Chicago.Bowman’s contract with Hendrick runs through the 2026 season. He made it clear that he felt the speculation about his future was overblown, but he definitely heard the talk.
“I think you need to win races whenever you’re at HMS,” he said. “But certainly nobody has made me feel like I’m on the hot seat. There’s never been a single conversation with a single person that has questioned anything to do with that at all. It’s all been: ‘What do you need, how can we help you, how can we support the team?'”
Bowman, 31, is in his seventh full season at Hendrick. The Arizona native got his first Cup Series victory at Chicagoland Speedway in 2019, won again in 2020 at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, California, then posted a career-best four wins during a breakout season in 2021.
Everything changed — and not for the better — after he won at Las Vegas in March 2022. That same year, he was sidelined for five races after he sustained a concussion in a crash at Texas Motor Speedway. Then he had the back injury last year that kept him out for three points events and the $1 million NASCAR All-Star Race.
“The concussion, and then to straight away go break my back after recovering from that, and then to just tremendously struggle through last year and kind of lose our way a little bit, it was really difficult,” he said.
Coming into Chicago, there was no sign that Bowman’s drought was about to end. He had engine trouble at New Hampshire Motor Speedway that ended his day on the 144th of 305 laps in Loudon on June 23, then finished 14th at Nashville Superspeedway last weekend.
While points can provide a path to postseason contention, it’s one with a lot less certainty than simply winning a race.
“I think the speed has been there,” Harris said. “We talked. We had an engine failure at Loudon, and we had an engine failure here last year at Chicago. As we talk through those things, he’s like, ‘Man, right as we’re in this point battle,’ and I’m like, ‘We’re one race away from that not mattering.'”
That one race was Sunday, and now Bowman and Harris can take a closer look at what they might do in the playoffs.
“I think race car drivers, they come up and they have accidents, and sometimes you have injuries,” Gordon said, “and you find out how tough you are mentally and physically and how bad you want to do it. Alex has been through a few significant injuries, and he’s come back, I feel like, stronger each time.”