Amidst Denny Hamlin, Joe Gibbs Racing, and Toyota’s triumphant statement at Bristol this past Sunday, Hendrick Motorsports managed to wave their flag with honor, as #48 Alex Bowman, and #5 Kyle Larson rounded out P4 and P5 securing a much-needed top-5 sweep. However, all the buzz surrounding “tire management” with the new resin-embedded track has sort of overshadowed Denny Hamlin’s second consecutive victory at Bristol. Moreover, Alex Bowman’s sudden resurgence, coming after his Daytona runner-up finish, is also receiving very few lenses. The #48, however, had some interesting “inspirations” to draw for his impressive display this past weekend, dating back to almost a decade, to his days as an ARCA regular.

Alex Bowman: The “Tire Veteran” from ARCA

If one looks at Bowman’s performance in the initial stages of the race, no one could anticipate that the driver would finish so high up. The HMS racer started in P29 and barely made the top 20 in the next two stages. However, he started Stage 3 from the 17th and went on to make his way through the field, passing 15 other cars, asking the #48 team to make his Camaro ZL1 “a little more free,” on the final restart. 

A true ARCA standout with 6 wins and 15 top 10s, as well as earning himself the ROTY awards in the premier ARCA Menards Series, and the ARCA East Series, Bowman revealed his previous “tire management” experiences in an interview with Hendrick Motorsports. “That was something I was really good at when I first went stock car racing. In the East Series and ARCA, you don’t have a lot of sets of tires. That was something I excelled at and I feel like I was able to apply that today. In the Cup Series, we run hard every single lap all race these days. Kind of fun to go back to that. Glad we ended up on the right end of it,” he shared.

The driver also revealed how his team did an amazing job and said, “With the situation we had, our Ally No. 48 team did a great job at maximizing everything, making the right calls, adjustments throughout the day, and knowing how to manage tires.” 

Alex Bowman’s last win for Hendrick came in 2022, at the Pennzoil 500 in Las Vegas, therefore, two top-5 placings, only five races into the season certainly discredit a lot of the critiques that the Arizona native has faced in recent days. The #48’s often unnoticed confidence was on evident display at pit road, as he told reporters how he managed tire troubles one more time. However, this time on an original “short track”.

Alex Bowman thinks the tire management issue at Bristol went a “little too far”

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When telling Adam Stern if the situations were different on the “cheese-grater” style concrete texture of the repaved Bristol, after its three years of dirt experiment, Bristol P4 finisher Bowman said, “Certainly different, you know, I’m all for tire management, I think probably the situation today was a little too far…”

The new Goodyear tires made all the noise after the race, and the 30-year-old Arizona native had his own choice of words for the series of events pertaining to almost a dozen rubber-related incidents. “It was something different and was more like a chess match, like at any point you could pass the car in front of you, but you were just going to kill the right side tires. Just had to be smart about it and we had a really good race car that was able to take care of the right side tires and maintain track position and glad to end up where we did.”

While Alex Bowman definitely gave fans something to remember at Bristol, do you think he’ll be able to replicate this superiority in next weekend’s COTA race too? Let us know in the comments below!

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