Bowman content with third-place finish at Talladega

Alex Bowman certainly would have liked to have been two spots better at the finish of Sunday’s race at Talladega Superspeedway, but he was grateful to even have been there at all.

“There is a lot of relief to finish and not crash,” said Bowman after crossing the finish line in third place. “The bigger relief for me is not crashing at a place like this. I don’t have many big hits left in me, and I’m tired of crashing. So, I’m glad that we got through one of these with a strong finish, and I’m happy for the team.

“They’ve had an incredibly rough go of it on a lot of angles for the entire season. So, yeah, definitely happy for these guys.”

Bowman ran just his fifth race of the season on Sunday. It was his third race back following a vertigo diagnosis that sidelined him for four weeks.

The thought of danger that comes with racing at superspeedways is always present when the series visits those facilities. But as relieved as Bowman was to get through Sunday, it wasn’t because he gave it an added thought, given his most recent adversity.

“I don’t think you can be in the race car actively worried about crashing, but it’s just something you know is a high possibility when you come to a speedway,” Bowman said. “You’re probably going to hit some stuff pretty hard. I try to avoid that when possible. I feel like I have one of those thick textbooks from my doctor’s records at this point, so just trying to avoid adding any more pages to that.”

A top-five effort for Bowman’s Hendrick Motorsports team is by far the high mark on the season. Their previous best was an 18th-place finish at Kansas Speedway.

“It feels good,” Bowman said. “I would much rather do it at a non-speedway so you feel like the driver had more to do with it, but things went our way there, and obviously called the strategy correctly and were able to stay up there. We had a great Ally (No.) 48. It feels good to get a solid finish. It’s been hard to see the finish of races this year, so glad to make it happen and happy for Carson [Hocevar] to get his first win.”

The win came down to a three-lap dash. Hocevar, who was second, chose the inside lane underneath leader Chris Buescher. Bowman chose the inside as well and was committed to pushing the Spire Motorsports driver.

It was Bowman’s only play given the circumstances. The field, once green, was again locked down side-by-side, and there is not much in the tool chest that a driver can do to break free from behind the leaders.

“I’ll have to watch it back,” Bowman said. “I think letting guys get down in front of me when I restarted there from the front row [on a previous restart] was really what sealed our fate. We needed Carson to get shoved up there and try to move up to block a run and open the bottom up. Other than that, I was just wide open, pushing Carson the best I could, trying to give him that run and also to try to get a Chevrolet in victory and the Hendrick engine shop a win.

“Yeah, just trying to push like hell and glad it worked out.”