One would think being a NASCAR Cup driver would have its own perks and advantages, especially for a top team like Hendrick Motorsports. But Texas Motor Speedway might not really agree. In a recent interview with PRN, Alex Bowman recalled having to sneak into Texas Motor Speedway in a rather hilarious way.

This was back in 2020, during the pandemic, when NASCAR was racing at Texas on a Wednesday. At some point during the day, Rick Hendrick’s #48 driver decided to step out for a quick bite on his own. However, when he wanted to come back, he realised he was missing an important thing.

“I forgot my hard card in my bus. And let me tell you, the lady at the front gate of Texas, it does not matter who you are, Jeff Gordon is not going through that tunnel without their hard card, and I snuck back in. I didn’t think I was gonna get back in, and I snuck back in the racetrack,” he described.

So, putting his quick thinking skills on display, Bowman engineered a solution.

“I drove really fast and held up a credit card. I knew if I stopped, I was in trouble. She does her job very well, and yeah I knew anywhere else I feel like I would have been okay, but not there,” Bowman added.

Interestingly, this wasn’t the only time Alex Bowman found himself in a funny situation. In 2020, he got stranded outside Texas Motor Speedway, and in 2024, he got stranded in the middle of a lake on a boat.

Talking to Jeff Gluck, Bowman revealed he went to a ‘really remote lake’ in South Carolina, which didn’t have any other boats. To add to the experience, there was no phone signal as well. And then a storm hit, and Bowman and Co. took shelter, waiting for it to pass. When the storm passed, they decided to start up the boat and go back. The only problem was that the boat wouldn’t fire back up.

“All my intoxicated friends had a panic attack and were melting down because their phones wouldn’t work. The sun was going down and there weren’t any other people out there,” he recalled.

Despite that, Bowman didn’t choose to simply sit back.

“I have always tinkered with cars and worked on my own stuff and was able to diagnose we didn’t have any fuel pressure. So then I started going through fuses and relays and trying to make the fuel pump work, and I got it fired up and got it back to the dock,” he described.

To make the experience even more hilarious, Bowman revealed he sold the boat on his way home simply because he didn’t want to be stranded on a lake again.

And the humor was a welcome change for Bowman and the No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports team, who had been enduring a rough stretch to start the 2026 Cup Series season, with nearly everything going wrong across the first nine races.

Alex Bowman steps out of his slump at Talladega

Finally, things seem to have begun to come together for Bowman after the Jack Link’s 500 race on Sunday at the Talladega Superspeedway.

The Hendrick Motorsports driver earned three stage points in Stage 2 and then kept a good position throughout the remainder of the race. He found himself drafting close behind Carson Hocevar and racing on the inside line of the 2.66-mile track.

In the end, the No. 48 team assisted Hocevar to get the necessary push and take the victory for the Spire Motorsports team (their first-ever Cup Series victory). And Bowman finished the race in third position, recording his first top-five result since Richmond last August, a span of 16 races.

“To be blunt, it just feels good to get out here without crashing,” Bowman told Fox Sports after the event. “I’m getting old, [and] don’t have much of that left in me. Glad to get out of here clean.

“We had a great Ally 48 Chevy all day. Felt like we played the race the best we could kind of with the situations we were given.”

This comes after Alex Bowman suffered a vertigo bout that lingered for over a month, forcing the eight-time Cup winner out of four races. It began on March 1 at Circuit of the Americas, when Myatt Snider replaced Bowman in the No. 48 for the final 20 laps as his symptoms set in.

With Bowman behind the wheel, the numbers reflected a rough reality. Heading into Talladega, he had just 42 points across five starts (last among full-time drivers). A strong outing at Talladega, though, nearly doubled that total, adding 37 points, though he still sits 36th in the standings.