CupScene.com

(By NASCAR Wire Service)

Posted: Saturday,October 30th, 2010

Last Sunday’s Chase race at Martinsville was doubly frustrating for Clint Bowyer. Not only did Bowyer swap pit crews before the race with teammate Kevin Harvick—the Richard Childress Racing driver who has the best chance to overtake Jimmie Johnson for the Sprint Cup championship—but he also spun and hit the wall at the .526-mile short track, damaging the car he also had planned to race at Phoenix. Bowyer qualified 17th, finished 38th and remained 12th in the Chase standings.

In the seventh installment of his Chase diary, Bowyer talks about the Martinsville race, Scott Miller’s hard work as a temporary replacement for suspended crew chief Shane Wilson, driving to Talladega with his brother, his prospects for Sunday’s race, potential race strategy for Harvick, Johnson and Denny Hamlin, and his determination to get his pit crew back at the end of the year.

Clint Bowyer, driver of the #33 Chevy (Photo by Jason Smith/Getty Images for NASCAR)

Martinsville was very, very frustrating, because we had such a great racecar in practice Friday and Saturday. We just made the wrong adjustments for Sunday’s race. It was way too tight. We were chasing forward bite, and notes and a lot of past history that we had in our notebooks showed that that wasn’t necessarily as big a problem on Sunday as it was on Saturday.

I think Scott Miller’s done a great job of filling in, but it’s hard for him to put faith in things he doesn’t know about. He’s in there filling in for a month. Anything that happened before then he doesn’t really know about, because he wasn’t a part of that.

So that’s a very difficult situation for him to be in. I don’t fault him a bit. We win together and we lose together, and we just had a crummy day together. Having a day like that, it’s just another gust of wind out of your sails. I’m just really, really looking forward to getting the season finished up, and hopefully having another good run and getting things pointed back in the right direction, so we can start the year off at Daytona out of the box like we did this year.

Obviously, we’ll take the next best thing to Phoenix, and it’s certainly capable of winning a race, but that was a brand new, latest and greatest car that we built for the short tracks—basically an identical replica, minus the 60 thousandths or whatever it was on the left rear (which caused Bowyer’s winning car to fail inspection after the first Chase race in New Hampshire).

It was on top of the board all weekend long. I messed up a little bit in qualifying. We went out way early, and that bit us in qualifying a little bit. But we just went the wrong way in the race and never could make up for it. Our teammates had a lot of success all day long, led a lot of laps, ran up front. It was frustrating to be that odd man out and not have much to look forward to.

I bought a fifth-wheel trailer that I’m going to take back to Emporia (Kan.) and go hunting out of. My brother and I were kind of getting things ready for that, and I said, “I’ll tell you what—why don’t you load everybody up and take ’em to Talladega.” We were bored Thursday, and he and I drove it down here, and everybody else flew down and met us. We camped out last night and had some dinner and had a good time.

We take for granted flying everywhere, and you just don’t get to see the country like you used to growing up, driving around the country to different racetracks. Everybody looks at me like I’m crazy, but I don’t mind driving—every now and then I like getting a little windshield time in.

I woke up Friday morning thinking about Talladega. It’s a fun place, somewhere a lot of people come and camp. I have a lot of friends come and camp out and watch the race, so I kind of hang out with family and friends and enjoy it and hopefully have a hell of a race on Sunday. You don’t have a lot of worry (about the car) going into a place like this, because I know our cars are going to be fast. If we can get ourselves in position at the end of the race, we can win this race.

I would expect Kevin, Denny and Jimmie to run in the back, just for the simple fact that, if I was in their shoes, that’s what I would do. If they do, or don’t, that’s up to them. I think you’ve got to go up feel your car out and make sure you can get up there, for one thing—lead a lap maybe, early or in the middle part of the race. The biggest thing is, as soon as you see ’em three-wide, beating and banging on each other, or see something you’re not comfortable with, you’d better get out of there.

This is certainly Kevin’s opportunity to try to gain on Jimmie. If he doesn’t—if he loses ground here—he’s really going to have a tough time at these last few racetracks, because they do play into Jimmie’s hands quite well.

I’m getting my pit crew back. He can enjoy ’em this year, but they’re my boys, and I certainly appreciate what they do. I have all year long. At the end of the day, I promised those guys that we’d be racing for a championship, and if I’m not, I owe it to them to try to put them in a situation where they can go win a championship.

I knew going in that they’d do a good job for Kevin at Martinsville. They’re arguably the best team on pit road. They’ve been together a long time, probably more than anybody on pit road. They’ve all kept their health and had a good time doing it.

—As told to Reid Spencer