After testing at North Wilkesboro, Alex Bowman made the judgment he was ready to return to action.
Bowman’s doctors concurred, and the driver of the No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet is back behind the wheel, starting with Monday’s Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
But Bowman knows the next few weeks in the NASCAR Cup Series car won’t be pain-free. The laps he ran at North Wilkesboro didn’t constitute the perfect preparation for Charlotte.
Bowman suffered a compression fracture of the spine in a sprint car accident Apr. 25 at 34 Raceway in West Burlington, Iowa, and he’s prepared to suffer the slings and arrows of occasional discomfort as the price of returning after a three-race absence.
“The doctor was like it’s healing, and you can do it based on pain tolerance, but you can’t simulate what it’s going to be like without getting in a race car,” Bowman said Saturday at Charlotte Motor Speedway. “And even that, you can’t simulate Charlotte at North Wilkesboro, so I don’t have a clue. It’s going to hurt. I don’t know how much it’s going to hurt.
“Hopefully, it doesn’t hurt very much, because at North Wilkesboro it didn’t. All we did was make long runs there to try and simulate being here and how long the 600 is. But we had two sets of tires, two hours and a flat race track that is really slick and doesn’t give you any G-forces. We have five-and-a-half hours (at Charlotte) with a ton of G-forces and a ton of grip, so it’s about as different as it could possibly get. But yeah, I think I’ll be all right.”
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