By: Zach Catanzareti, Staff Writer
Ever since the Hendrick Motorsports crew unloaded their No. 88 Chevrolet Friday at Richmond Raceway, the weekend was a blunder. For Alex Bowman, the following 400 laps of racing proved to solve very little of the team’s initial struggles.
In fact, it created more.
Struggling and eventually failing to stay on the lead lap in the race’s two 100-lap stages, Bowman was the victim of the race’s second caution of the night when he was deliberately spun by Austin Dillon in Turn 3.
The contact was set off when Bowman and Dillon made contact following a restart three laps prior.
“We were in the lucky dog spot until that happened, so that was a bummer,” Bowman said. It’s really frustrating. Just a crappy day.”
Bowman didn’t mince words when asked about Dillon’s antics during the incident.
“He just races dumb,” he said. “It’s Richmond, it’s hard to race not-dumb here sometimes. I don’t know. He drove me all the way to the inside wall on the restart and then drove off into [Turn] 3 and cleaned us out. That’s short track racing, you’ll have it.”
The race was already in turmoil, however, and Bowman only managed a 23rd-place finish in the end. He was only one spot ahead of the lowest playoff finisher of teammate William Byron.
“We really did it to ourselves. Just really bad ever since we unloaded, never really got the handle on it,” he said. “It wasn’t from a lack of effort, all the guys worked hard. We came here wanting to have a racecar that turned really well all day and we got that.
“We just had no drive from the time we unloaded to the checkered flag. We didn’t execute well to top it off.”
Leaving Richmond just two points behind the cutoff spot in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series playoffs, the fight is on.
“We’ll go to the Roval — our road course cars are good, we were good there last year,” he said. “Hopefully, we’ll be all right.”