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With Alex Bowman’s status again indefinite as NASCAR heads to Las Vegas Motor Speedway, it’s a good time to note this track is another mark of his redoubtable resilience.
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Bowman was racing a midget car on the slick LVMS Dirt Track in February 2010 when his left front caught a big tractor tire used to mark the course’s inside boundary. His car flipped several times, leaving the 16-year-old with a few broken ribs, punctured lungs, two broken collarbones and burst blood vessels in his eyes.
He spent roughly a week in intensive care.
“I just remember waking up in the hospital and wondering if there was another race the next day,” Bowman said during a 2017 episode of the NASCAR on NBC Podcast. “I was like, ‘Can we fix the car?’ ‘No, they cut you out of it with the JAWS of life.’ Oh. Can we get another car?”
Bowman admittedly rushed his recovery, returning in five weeks rather than the doctor’s recommended 10.
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“It wasn’t that scary, because I don’t remember the crash,” Bowman said. “It doesn’t really bother me. I feel it might if I remembered it, but I got knocked out pretty quickly as it was flipping. That probably helped me out a little bit. It was interesting.”
Many descriptors would encapsulate Bowman’s racing journey, and “interesting” certainly would be one.
Others that might fit (aside from “generally successful” ): Adverse. Eventful. Unlucky.
Perhaps the simplest way to put it: Bowman, 32, is the most star-crossed Cup Series winner of his generation.
In eight seasons at Hendrick Motorsports, he has seven playoff appearances and eight victories, but also a notable string of misfortune that consistently seems to overshadow his success in NASCAR’s premier series.
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The latest is a bout of vertigo that will sideline him for a second consecutive Cup race since the debilitating symptoms forced him from the No. 48 Chevrolet at Circuit of The Americas. He was replaced midrace by Myatt Snider, who was pressed into service from his FOX Sports production job.
It was another instance of the freak injuries and bizarre timing that seem to befall Bowman on the regular.
After all, this is the driver who infamously learned he’d been fired by Tommy Baldwin Racing from scrolling Twitter at the drive-thru lane of the Taco Bell at Exit 36 in Mooresville, North Carolina.
“I called my manager, and he’s like, ‘What are you talking about?”” Bowman told The Athletic in 2020. “I’m like, ‘Twitter says I’m fired, man! Call people!’ It took hours to get ahold of anybody. I didn’t go to the shop, obviously, because I was like, ‘Well, this is going to be super awkward if I just walk in there.””
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Bowman turned it into a positive by using his extra time to become the simulator driver at Hendrick Motorsports. Six months later, when Dale Earnhardt Jr. was benched by a concussion, Bowman was in the No. 88 Chevrolet for 10 of the final 17 races of the season. He drove well enough to win the ride when Earnhardt retired after 2017.
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He steadily improved with the best team in NASCAR. By his fourth season, Bowman had a personal-best four victories in 2021.
But his last win that season was tainted by a run-in while racing for the lead with six laps remaining at Martinsville Speedway. He made contact with Denny Hamlin, who spun and called the No. 48 driver “an absolute hack” (reinforcing the stereotype that Bowman backs into his victories).
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The 2021 season would be a competitive peak for Bowman, who would miss five races with a concussion during the 2022 playoffs and then be benched for three more in 2023 because of a fractured vertebra in a sprint car crash.
alex bowman and jeff gordon
Amid rumblings that his No. 48 Chevrolet ride was on the line in 2024, he scored a victory in the Chicago Street Race that quieted the speculation until it began to pick up again entering this season.
Which is a shame, because in many ways, Bowman is a great fit at Hendrick Motorsports, an organization that at times has struggled to find the perfect dynamic since expanding to a fourth car 22 years ago.
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During that span, it seemed as if one driver — whether Earnhardt, Casey Mears, Kasey Kahne or Brian Vickers — was an outlier whose lagging results got juxtaposed with the sterling performance of current and future Hall of Famers.
Teamed with NASCAR’s most popular driver (Chase Elliott), one of the world’s most versatile stars (Kyle Larson) and a likely future Cup champion (William Byron), Bowman has managed to hold his own by winning races while being happy with a relatively low profile.
An introvert with an appealingly acerbic and deadpan sense of humor (“I like dogs more than people”), he’s the perfect fourth driver for Hendrick.
Many would take that as a backhanded compliment, but it’s just reality for Bowman, who rarely takes anything personally. He’s the self-deprecating sort who turned Hamlin’s “Hack” dig into a popular T-shirt and never seems discouraged or distracted by the rumors he’s on the edge of losing his job.
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His mantra is that “every year is a contract year,” and it’s a survival instinct that has served him well over the years of never-ending curveballs to his NASCAR future.
“It doesn’t really matter the situation, I’ve never felt 100% secure,” Bowman said.
Until he returns to the No. 48 — and very likely afterward — there undoubtedly will be whispers again about what’s next. This is a contract year for a driver who has made a career of proving himself amid difficult circumstances.
It might be his toughest comeback yet … but don’t bet against Alex Bowman.
Even when the odds are stacked against him, he’s shown a stubborn persistence in always beating them.
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