Bowman heads Hendrick rout
Alex Bowman led home his team-mates as the Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet crew dominated the NASCAR Cup race at Dover last weekend. He grabbed control during the round of pitstops on lap 304 of 400 and never let go, holding off Kyle Larson by two seconds to score the fourth topflight win of his career.
Fellow Hendrick racers Chase Elliott and William Byron finished third and fourth, marking the first time in the team’s history that its cars had locked out the top four.
Bowman’s win at Dover carried added weight because it came at the track where the driver he replaced this season – seventime Cup champion Jimmie Johnson – had won 11 times in his career.
“It’s pretty amazing,” reflected Bowman. “We’ve been off for a couple weeks but we’re still the same race team that won at Richmond. We’ve just been a little down on ourselves. We got us back motivated after a rough week last weekend at Darlington. Our pitstops were incredible today. But to run 1-2-3-4 for HMS, it’s so cool.”
Completing the top 10 were Joey
Logano, Kevin Harvick, Denny Hamlin, Tyler Reddick, Daniel Suarez and Cole Custer, the last-named earning his best finish of the season so far.
Larson had dominated much of the race, winning the first two stages. After losing the lead to Bowman during the pitstops, he was able to stay close to his stablemate for several laps, but never got in position to challenge to reclaim the lead.
“All four of us HMS cars were pretty equal,” Larson said. “It was like whoever got out in the lead was going to be hard to beat. On one of the restarts, I got to his bumper and kind of got him loose, but Harvick was coming so we had to let each other go.”