Bowman 'not where I want to be' through NASCAR's summer stretch

A little over three months ago, Alex Bowman led the NASCAR Cup Series championship point standings and was off to the best start of his career.

But as Bowman knows, things can change quickly in racing, and they have for him and the No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports team. Entering Sunday night’s race at Atlanta Motor Speedway (7 p.m. ET, USA), Bowman is 20th in the championship standings and below the playoff grid cutline.

He hasn’t finished inside the top 10 since Richmond Raceway in early April. Despite the cyclical nature of success, Bowman said it “for sure” has been wild how things changed.

“I think losing Blake (Harris, crew chief) for four weeks...there were so many disruptions to how our season started,” Bowman said of the team’s penalty for hood louvers. “We just have to get back to it. I think physically, from where I’m at, I’m definitely not where I want to be either.

“There are a lot of complications with the penalties and breaking your back and everything that went on kind of middle of the beginning of the season. But we just have to keep digging.”

A return to form is the main focus for Bowman and his team -- one that can’t come soon enough.

Bowman looked on the brink of winning through the first 10 races of the season with six top-10 finishes. He also led the series in average finish.

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On April 26, he fractured a vertebra in his back during a sprint car race, sidelining him for three points races and the All-Star Race at North Wilkesboro.

“I just feel like just this point of the year, middle of the summer, typically I’m at a certain level, and I’m not at that because it took so long to recover,” Bowman said. “Then you get back to racing, and you’re sore for the whole rest of the week.

“I would say this week is the closest I’ve had to a normal week of training and I was probably 75 percent of what I want to be at, so still trying to get back there. I don’t think it hurts me in the car, but just every little thing adds up.”

Currently, he is 26 points below the cutline. There are eight races, including Atlanta, left in the regular season.

“I think missing four weeks while the rest of the competition is getting better every week doesn’t help things,” Bowman said. “We’ve been OK; we just haven’t had a race that things went well for us. We’ve been on the wrong side of about every caution, on strategy, obviously; an engine failure (in Chicago) wasn’t good, pit stall deal hurt us a ton at Charlotte... So it’s just been like every week something bad happens to us.

“If we can just go execute, run how we should... I feel like we haven’t had race-winning speed the last couple of weeks, but we’ve had decent enough speed to run OK, and we haven’t even been able to execute that. Just have to get the momentum shifted, I guess.”