By: Zach Catanzareti, Staff Writer
The rough-and-tumble recent past of Hendrick Motorsports ended — at least momentarily — in Monday’s rain-postponed Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway.
Here, the four-car team put two cars in the top five at the end of 500 laps, with Jimmie Johnson leading the organization in third and first-year HMS driver Alex Bowman two steps back in fifth, securing his career-best Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series finish.
For Bowman, it was also his second top-10 finish on a short track, backing up a seventh place at Martinsville last month. The No. 88 lined up sixth — third on the preferable outside lane for restarts — on the race’s final restart with 22 laps to go. The Arizona native said that sealed the deal for a good run to the end.
“We got a good start there for once and had good track position,” Bowman said. “Finally getting some good runs going our way has been cool.”
Running top 10 on average for only the second time in 2018, Bowman felt he had even more to offer than fifth spot.
“By ourselves, I think we were even better than that,” he said. “I couldn’t be consistent with it. We were really, really loose in. My car was sensitive in traffic if anyone got within a car length behind me, it turned us sideways. It was interesting to fight through that.”
Adding another step toward the goal of Victory Lane, the 24-year-old doesn’t want to lay his expectations to just top fives.
“Running fifth isn’t a great day but it’s better than what we started the year doing,” he said. “We’re making progress and steps in the right direction. Just have to keep doing that.”
Johnson has been the leader of the team in 2018, offering his 16 years of Cup experience to complement the lack of which in Bowman, Chase Elliott and rookie William Byron. But even the No. 48 has joined his teammates outside the top 10 most of the time. Monday was only the seven-time champ’s second top 10 of the year and first top five since Dover last October.
“I’ve been saying for the last couple weeks that we’ve been better but we just haven’t had a clean race,” Johnson said. “We had plenty of struggles through just bad luck. We had a fast car, good-driving car and was able to kind of run third to fourth all day long.”
The struggle hasn’t been without hard work behind the scenes, and Johnson felt the man hours finally showed on the track at Bristol.
“It’s impossible to describe how much teamwork, how much effort, sleepless nights, everything that’s going into getting ur Hendrick Chevrolets more speed,” he said. “All four cars showed speed. Seeing the No. 88 in third and us in fifth, we’re getting better and better each week.”