Around Iredell Sports

2007 Sep-18

Chase may have some surprises

NASCAR driver Clint Bowyer cheers after winning his first NASCAR Nextel Cup victory during the Sylvania 300 at New Hampshire International Speedway in Loudon, N.H., on Sunday. AP photo.

By Mike Mulhern
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LOUDON, N.H. - Considered long-shots to win the Chase for the Championship just a few days ago, Clint Bowyer and crew chief Gil Martin certainly have their rivals scratching their heads today.

Or maybe Bowyer’s win here Sunday is simply an omen, an indication that this Chase may be filled with the unexpected.

Being curtly dismissed by those predicting the shape of the Chase has only served to get Bowyer going.

“It’s fuel for the fire,’‘ he said. “It makes you want to win and run up front and prove to the media and everybody else that you belong here.”

NASCAR’s whirlwind media blitz through New York in the days before this race may have stoked the fire. Bowyer certainly isn’t a household sports name in that city. And his roots are small-town — Emporia, Kan.

Bowyer, a surprise pick by Richard Childress last year for his third Nextel Cup team, has only a few years of asphalt racing under his belt and is still a relative unknown in NASCAR. And he’s still a golly-gee guy.

Bowyer and Martin both figure that if they can keep it all loose and cool these next nine weeks, they may be a team to be reckoned with.
Bowyer certainly drove like a man on a mission on Sunday.

“It’s a big deal, it’s very important, and I didn’t want to mess up again,’‘ Bowyer said. “I felt like I definitely messed up last week in Richmond and let one go. I rode my motorcycle back from Richmond, which took five or six hours, and I thought about that mistake. You learn from your mistakes…. Last year I made a ton of mistakes and learned from them.”

Martin wouldn’t let his driver shoulder it all: “Clint can’t take all the blame for that. We should have been a little more in his ear at Richmond. We just let him run a little too hard.

“We’ve made that mistake before. We won’t make that mistake again.”

“The last month and a half we’ve had some pretty good runs, but we weren’t able to make that gamble that it may have taken to get track position and be in contention to win,” Bowyer said. “We finally got it done.”

And Bowyer was so fast that Martin had to keep chirping at him to keep him reined in.

“When you’re passing lapped cars at the rate of speed he was doing it, it’s harder to hold yourself back,” Martin said.

“He kept trying to calm me down,” Bowyer said. “The sun came back that last run, and I couldn’t run the line I had been running all day, so I had to switch my line. Once I calmed down, we got back to running good lap times.

“But, man, it was really chattering the front tires bad. And I kept looking in my mirror to see where they were.”

With a six-second spread on runner-up Jeff Gordon at the finish, Bowyer had to squint hard.

Martin, though he has been around the sport for years, is still earning a name for himself. In fact, Martin may be as underrated in this Chase as Bowyer.

“Ever since I got partnered up with Gil, I just felt comfortable with him, and I like his style,” Bowyer said. “We enjoy racing with each other, and that makes it fun.”

Martin has not been a big fan of the car of tomorrow, but he’s certainly found some tricks that work, on flat tracks such as New Hampshire International Speedway, at least. That should certainly put Bowyer in the picture at Phoenix in a few weeks, also.

The car of tomorrow used here is one of four new versions Martin built just for the Chase.

“Not that we’ve been holding back, but we had some things we wanted to try that we weren’t for sure how they were going to work out,” Martin said. “And with limited practice time, you don’t know.
“We didn’t want to take that gamble leading into the Chase, because this was the big picture — getting here.

“Now that we’re here, some of the things we’ve wanted to try the last three or four races, we are able to put into the car now.

“That’s the same with the engine program and everything else. Anybody who has been around Richard knows that his conservative approach about everything we do ends up paying off in the long run.”

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