Kansas was a case of what might have been for Bowman

Alex Bowman was left thinking about what could have been after the AdventHealth 400 at Kansas Speedway.

Bowman finished fifth, which was not indicative of the speed and performance he and the No. 48 team had Sunday afternoon. The Hendrick Motorsports driver qualified 21st and spent the first stage making it look easy as he came through the field and quickly into the top 10 on the leaderboard.

He finished sixth in the first stage and seventh in the second, but the race got away from Bowman in the second stage when he hit the wall off Turn 2. He was squeezed to the wall in a three-wide battle when Denny Hamlin and Zane Smith both moved up the track.

“We were really good to start, obviously,” Bowman said. “We were really fast with our Ally Chevy, and hats off to everybody at Hendrick Motorsports. You don’t get cars that are that fast very often – I said that last weekend – and we got another one this week. I’m super pleased with my race car. I crashed it on the restart in Stage 2, and it did everything worse the whole rest of the day, and we still ran top five. So, hats off to Blake [Harris] and all the guys.”

To the naked eye, Bowman admitted the damage was significant. It not only knocked the toe out but also destroyed the body.

Bowman explained, “these things are just super sensitive. It’s a bummer that happened.”

On the upside, the team picked up its first top-five finish since Homestead-Miami at the end of March. It is their seventh top-10 finish in 12 races, which is the second most in the series.

“I would have loved to see what we could have done with a clean race car, but unfortunately, we’ll never know,” Bowman said. “We’ll move on to the next one, but it’s a solid day to overcome that much damage. I got super tight after that through the center (of the corner), and then I would get really loose in and off (the corner). So, I just kind of fought the race car from there.

“But a heck of a race car before that.”