The NASCAR Cup Series postseason has been good for Alex Bowman, but not good enough.
He and his No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports team have three top-10 finishes in four races, which is good enough for a 9.5 average finish. It’s the second-best average of all playoff drivers, and Bowman is one of four who has three top 10s, but he’s the one at the top of the field in stage points earned (53).
“It’s been a good four weeks for us,” Bowman said Saturday at Talladega Superspeedway. “We have a long way to go, though, so we have to keep executing at a high level. I certainly know that we’re capable of it and I’m capable of it, but we just have a long way to go and need to keep it up.”
Of the Hendrick Motorsports drivers, Bowman and Elliott are the only two who have earned four top-10 finishes in three races. They both have the same average finish, but William Byron and Kyle Larson sit above Bowman on the playoff grid having put together a much better regular season, giving them the insurance (playoff) points to help their cause.
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Bowman had just one win in the regular season. The five playoff points from that were the only bonus points he carried into the postseason.
The turnaround in performance has come at the right time. On the topic of consistency, Bowman said after last weekend at Kansas Speedway his team has “been OK” with better pace in the race car, and that they were headed in the right direction.
It was not a tongue-in-cheek comment about their — perhaps unexpected — rise in the championship hunt.
“That’s how I feel,” Bowman said. “We haven’t won in the playoffs and we’re running OK; we’re not running amazing. I think last week we had a really fast race car and the last restart didn’t work out. We’re doing well, but we’re eight above the cutline, so probably not good enough at the moment.”