NASCAR News from ThatsRacin.com

Clint Bowyer heard the critics loud and clear last year when the Richard Childress Racing driver squeaked into NASCAR’s Chase for the championship by taking the 12th and final spot despite not winning a race.

It took Bowyer one glorious Sunday to shut them up.

Bowyer captured the first checkered flag of his Sprint Cup career during the fall race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway last year, a win that propelled him to a career-best third-place finish in the season points race.

A year later, not much has changed.

Bowyer once again had to sweat it out, needing a 12th-place finish in the race at Richmond to grab one of the coveted Chase spots ahead of Kasey Kahne and David Ragan.

Yet under the new points system, Bowyer is seeded fifth for the beginning of this year’s Chase, which starts on Sunday at the site of his breakthrough win. He’ll head to the starting grid at New Hampshire trailing series leader Kyle Busch by 70 points.

“We come into this thing a little bit better than we did last year,” Bowyer said. “Last year all the naysayers said: ‘He’s the only one in the Chase who has not won a race’ and now we have won a race this year and you can’t say that about us.”

Bowyer’s win at Richmond in May proved he’s ready to compete at the front, but the road to the postseason has been bumpy. He spent most of the summer on the bubble, floating between spots 10-13 as his No. 07 Jack Daniels Chevrolet scrambled to find any consistency.

“We have struggled this summer, there’s no way of getting around it,” Bowyer said.

Yet when he needed to get it done, Bowyer found a way. He moved back into the top 12 for good with a seventh-place finish at Bristol and followed it up with a top-10 at Fontana and avoided disaster in Richmond to make the field.

Now that he’s in, Bowyer sees no reason to think he can’t recapture the magic that made him one of the circuit’s hottest drivers last fall.

“Things have been looking for the better to catapult ourselves into this thing and it shows me that ‘Hey, we can pick the program up again like we did last year and make some noise in this thing,” he said.

Bowyer will have plenty of help. Teammates Kevin Harvick and Jeff Burton are also in the field, and even though each is gunning for their first series title, Bowyer expects all three teams to continue to work together to fight powerhouse teams at Joe Gibbs Racing (Busch and Denny Hamlin) and Hendrick Motorsports (Jimmie Johnson, Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr.)….

Continue reading this story on ThatsRacin.com

No related posts.