Alex Bowman finishes fifth in return to Chicagoland

Alex Bowman finishes fifth in the No. 48 Chevrolet for Hendrick Motorsports at Chicagoland Speedway.

He scored his third top five finish of the season and first since Texas in May.

He also defeated Austin Cindric to move onto the third round of NASCAR’s In-Season Challenge. Bowman currently sits 29th in the regular season points.

Bowman scored his first career NASCAR Cup Series win at Chicagoland back in 2019. He returned to the track for the first time in seven years which gave him a major boost.

A few hours before the green flag, Bowman had a plaque unveiled by Chicagoland celebrating his 2019 win.

Bowman qualified in 12th. He finished 18th in stage one after running top 15 and top 20 for most of the stage. He broke into the top ten for the first time during stage two. Bowman got eighth in stage two and scored three stage points.

Bowman then climbed into the top five during the final stage after a long run and pit stops.

Post Race Comments

After the race, Bowman said, “it feels really good because of how bad everything else has been, but its good we get to do this more often than not.”

Bowman then was asked about succeeding at a track he’s won at before and said, “we’ve sucked at a lot of places that I’ve had success at before so i think anything in the past years we threw out the window with this race car.”

On race execution, he said, “we improved all day, we made the car better pretty much every pit stop, Blake (Harris) made really good calls, we did everything right so it definitely feels great to be on the right side of things.” He still felt he was bad on restarts throughout the race.

Bowman also thought the track closed off and forced him down to the bottom as the race went on. He still called it a “super fun racetrack” and a very technical one.

Going into Atlanta next week, Bowman said, “I feel like you have to pay a speedway tax. To get good speedway finishes you gotta have bad speedway finishes and we had two bad speedway finishes and then we were in third at Talladega so we’re still owed one good speedway finish so hopefully we can do that this weekend.” Bowman crashed out at the spring race at Atlanta.

Bowman, who is the No. 32 seed of the In-Season Challenge will face Todd Gilliland next week at Atlanta.