Bowman Hoping ‘Showman’ Status Returns In Playoff Run

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Alex Bowman may enter the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs as part of the sport’s most decorated organization, but he’s arguably one of the most overlooked when it comes to chasing a championship.

When sizing up the field of 16 drivers that made the postseason, it doesn’t take a genius to see Hendrick Motorsports may have the best shot at producing a champion, with all four of its cars in contention for the Bill France Cup.

Top-seeded and current lead Hendrick driver Kyle Larson enters the playoffs as one of the favorites to win his second title, with a series-high four wins in the regular season, while other teammates William Byron and Chase Elliott both have extensive postseason resumes in their own rights.

Elliott won the Cup Series title under the elimination format in 2020, and Byron is fresh off his first Championship 4 appearance last season and making his sixth straight playoff run.

As has been the case since joining the winningest team in the sport’s history full-time back in 2018, Bowman enters as the definitive underdog of the bunch, having strung together another silent, yet respectable, regular season through 26 races.

For someone nicknamed “The Showman,” Bowman has never been one to turn heads on a weekly basis. However, he does have a reputation for surprising in big moments, including his surprise victory in July at the Chicago (Ill.) Street Course.

Outside of coming up clutch in unsuspecting situations, the 31-year-old from Tucson, Ariz., has silently managed to prove himself as one of the more consistent drivers in the garage each season. Case in point, he ranked 12th in the driver standings during the regular season with a 15.4 average finish.

In total, Bowman has posted six top-five and 12 top-10 finishes this year, including his win at Chicago and a runner-up effort in the Daytona 500 to start the season. The only area of true concern is that he’s led just 14 laps to this point, with more than half of his time spent up front coming at the site of his victory.

Following his win, Bowman recorded a podium finish in the next race, but since then the driver of the No. 48 hasn’t finished better than 16th and has a 24.2 average over the last five races.

As a result, he enters the Round of 16 on the points bubble, with a tiebreaker over fellow single-race winners Chase Briscoe and Harrison Burton and only one point ahead of Joe Gibbs Racing teammates Martin Truex Jr. and Ty Gibbs in the bottom two spots.

“We haven’t been where we need to be for the last little bit,” Bowman said.” Our season has kind of been broken up into streaks of really good runs, and then streaks of really bad runs. So, I think if we can get the streak of really good runs to fall well for the next 10 weeks, I think we can be in a really good spot. I think there’s no reason why we’re not capable of doing that. We just need things to go our way, and we need to put our best foot forward.

“We need to qualify better. We need to execute better. I need to do everything on my end better. We need to be better on pit road,” Bowman added. “Across the board, we need to be better. Yeah, I’ve made a couple mistakes over the last couple of weeks; sped on pit road at Richmond, crashed at Michigan. And then we’ve had some cars that we’ve struggled with and some things on pit road happened.

“But across the board, we need to be better. We’ve got 10 weeks to go and prove we can be better.”

Given his season inconsistencies, many consider Bowman to be the fourth among the four Hendrick drivers entering the Round of 16. But is the notion warranted?

Sure, Larson has clearly asserted himself as a legitimate favorite for the championship, but the case can be made for similar uncertainty to Bowman’s with Elliott and Byron.

Elliott has been “Mr. Consistency” this season, posting the series-best average for a bulk of the season until regular-season champion Tyler Reddick took over the mark last weekend at Darlington (S.C.) Raceway.

Going back to last year, the 2020 champion carried a 22-race top-20 streak through 19 starts this season, which aided in his model for consistency. However, his win and top-10 totals from this season match those of Bowman.

Byron is an interesting case study, because he was the first driver in the series to score three wins this season, but all of those came in the first eight races. Since then, he’s had an incredibly up-and-down season, and largely rivals Bowman’s numbers since Indianapolis in July with a 22nd-place average and three DNFs.

Byron did finish runner up at Michigan Int’l Speedway and has laps led over his last three starts, but the results just have not been there.

So why can’t “The Showman” rival or outperform his teammates? Many are quick to forget that Bowman not only qualified for the playoffs five straight seasons before missing the cut last year, but he also made it to the Round of 12 each time, including a Round of 8 appearance and career-best points finish of sixth in 2020.

While Bowman’s teammates have all advanced to the Championship 4 under the current points format, there’s no reason to believe the 31-year-old can’t make his first final-round appearance in his sixth postseason attempt.

He will, however, have his work cut out for him, with the odds heavily against him going into a wild three-race opening stanza.

Beginning with Atlanta (Ga.) Motor Speedway, Bowman scored a top 10 the first year of the track’s reconfiguration, but placed 27th in February and has a dismal 21.8 average in five starts on the new superspeedway banking.

He has finished as high as third at the 1.54-mile track, but that was back in 2021, the year before the reconfiguration.

Some of Bowman’s best outings this year have been on road courses, but Watkins Glen (N.Y.) Int’l has been a major source of ire throughout his career. With a career-best effort of 14th (three times) and a finish last year of 23rd, chances are he will have to conjure up another magic moment in order to be competitive, with the variable of a brand-new tire coming into play there as well.

Finally, the most “uniform” track in the Round of 16 is the cutoff race at Bristol Motor Speedway. Not only did Bowman score a career-best finish of fourth there earlier this year, he’s also finished in the top five in two of his last four starts at Thunder Valley.

The only problem? The tires being used will also likely pose a major challenge, based on the way the .533-mile track grated Goodyear rubber back in the spring.

But Bowman believes that, if his team survives the opening playoff round, he could make a deeper run.

“I think the superspeedway races, obviously, can be a big wild card,” Bowman noted. “Watkins Glen has been pretty hard on us over the years, so we’re super focused on being better there.

“Beyond that, if we get rolling in the right direction, we can be good anywhere, I feel like.”

The NASCAR Cup Series playoffs open Sunday at Atlanta with the Quaker State 400 available at Walmart. Broadcast coverage – with only side-by-side commercials during green-flag action – is slated for 3 p.m. ET, live on USA, the Performance Racing Network, and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, channel 90.