Clint Bowyer capped a solid day at Pocono Raceway with a fifth-place finish in Sunday’s Pocono 400, but he was chagrined by a Lap 152 restart where he dropped two spots.
“I’m a little bit frustrated,” Bowyer acknowledged. “Wherever you came off Turn 1 is where you ran.”
The race left the Stewart-Haas cars still searching for the speed necessary to compete with the Joe Gibbs Racing contingent, and it left Bowyer wondering how to accumulate some stage points in the process. The No. 14 team was blanked in both the first and second stages of the race.
“We had a pretty good car,” said Bowyer, who scored 32 points for the event, compared with 45 for pole winner William Byron, who finished ninth but ran second in Stage 1 and third in Stage 2. “We had a third-to-fifth place car.
“That’s about what we had, and we did a good job finishing with what we had. We’re just giving up way too many stage points. We have to figure out how to get some stage points. That’s all we had today.”
Greg is the author of "The Nuts and Bolts of NASCAR: The Definitive Viewers' Guide to Big-Time Stock Car Auto Racing" and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, a Masters degree in psychology and is currently a PhD candidate majoring in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek.
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