Gutsy Adjustment, Strong Restart Sends Alex Bowman to Richmond Win
Plot twist!
For much of Sunday afternoon at Richmond Raceway, it appeared as if Joey Logano and Denny Hamlin would settle the Toyota Owners 400 amongst themselves.
With no hyperbole intended, the Team Penske No. 22 and Joe Gibbs Racing No. 11 teams were in a league of their own. With only a dozen cars on the lead lap for much of the afternoon, Logano and Hamlin were often within a couple of seconds of each other with everyone else far behind or laps down.
It was literally a two-car race.
That was the case until a flat tire sent Kevin Harvick into the wall with 20 laps to go. The incident brought everyone down pit road for four tires, a test of over-the-wall precision and one last set-up adjustment.
Hamlin wasn’t able to complete the decisive pass in the laps leading up to the final caution but won the race off pit road. That was important. He controlled the restart and just needed to clear Logano into Turn 1 … or so he thought.
Not 75 laps earlier, Alex Bowman was eighth and 15 seconds behind those same two leaders. He closed to third before the final restart and was exactly where he wanted to be when Logano gave him the bottom at the ‘choose cone.’
Green flag.
Hamlin easily clears Logano, but Bowman stays right on the leader’s rear bumper. Bowman clears Logano and it takes just one more lap to get under Hamlin and to the lead.
At the decisive moment of the race, a still winless Hamlin had led 694 laps this spring and Bowman led only the opening lap of the Daytona 500. For what it’s worth, Logano has led 314 to that point and won three weeks ago on the dirt at Bristol Motor Speedway.
It’s cliché, but Bowman led the laps that mattered, the final 10 and became the eighth different winner in nine events to open the season.
Hamlin and Logano were left incredulous, not that Bowman expected it either.
"We were pretty awful on short runs all day," Bowman conceded.
He honestly thought the caution had doomed them to a finish outside of the top-five.
And then …
"We just took off," Bowman said. "My strong suit all day was being able to get into the corner really deep. I was able to get in deep, beside Denny. I knew I had the preferred lane, could probably clear him. I kind of figured he would get right back to me and be faster than us.
"When we drove away, I was like, 'Oh, my gosh, what's happening?' We had some really fast laps there. I was super loose the last couple of laps. I did my best to give it back away."
He didn’t, and Bowman won for the first time since inheriting the No. 48 made famous by Jimmie Johnson on the same day the seven-time Cup Series champion made his IndyCar debut at Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama.
Bowman doesn’t even know what adjustment crew chief Greg Ives made on that final stop.
"I didn't see a wedge wrench go in it, so I would say air pressure stuff," Bowman said. "Which is typically your go-to for short run versus long run stuff. It sure woke it up, that's for sure."
It left Hamlin and Logano beside themselves.
"I thought it was going to be a battle between the front row, especially the way we launched on the final restart there," Logano said. "Just could barely hang on to the 11's quarter down into (Turn 1). I thought maybe I can roll the top here. Got there, the front just wasn't woken up yet. Wasn't turning for about three laps.
"Obviously the 48 was in a different league for about five laps -- a pretty obvious adjustment they made there."
Hamlin realized it, too.
"The 48 had his tires pumped up so he was able to take off there, get the lead, build a big enough lead," Hamlin said. "I didn't have enough time to get back to him."
By his own admission, Bowman had his hands full with the inflated air pressure after the initial five laps but held on to win by just .381 of a second.
"Alex said it was tight taking off," Ives said. "The multiple times you keep losing spots on restarts, you try to figure out what adjustment you need to make to make it happen.
Bowman drove from eighth to third over a long run so Ives knew the car was capable under the right circumstances. At the same time, he said that specific air pressure doesn’t work if they’re restarting sixth or if there’s any more than 15 laps remaining.
The caution just happened to fall in the sweet spot for Ives to make that call.
"That's probably where those guys who thought it was a gamble came from," Ives said. "We had a good car, but we didn't have a good car in the circumstance that we needed to make adjustments to it. Otherwise we were just going to struggle on the restart, probably finish third or fourth.
"If we're sitting sixth maybe, but we're sitting there third, have the ability to make an adjustment, allow us to take advantage of -- shift our strength of our car towards the front of the run versus the end of the run."
It was a call he learned dating back to a Richmond race on top of the pit box for Dale Earnhardt Jr.
"I think we were running top-five, top-eight, something like that," Ives said. "We had an adjustment late. It worked okay but didn't work quite exactly how we wanted. He didn't yell at me, but he advised me on some of the things that this track did in the last 50 laps.
He refined that same call at the start of the race on Sunday with a guaranteed 30 lap run to the competition caution.
"We made some adjustments to try to trial that," Ives said. "I'm not going to sit here and lie. I knew we were going in the right direction. I didn't think it was anything magical. I just thought it was the right direction.
"We put that in our memory bank and went from there. Know that we did make adjustments based on his comments throughout the race, and what he thought he needed on the short run."
Bowman entered the race 17th in the championship standings, but that’s not the entirety of the story. The No. 48 lost fourth gear at Bristol after running up front early in the race. There was a speeding penalty at Martinsville and was caught up in a late crash.
That’s to say the speed has been there, and now Bowman is in the playoffs, and can start to build on a deep run into October and November.
I mean, I feel like lately we've been really, really fast each and everywhere we've gone. Atlanta, we ran third. Bristol, we're the best car, break a transmission. Go to Martinsville, the 12 was probably the best car, but we were probably the second-best car. We have our issue there.
"Pretty happy with where we're at right now," Bowman said. "We're going to a lot of places that statistically I've struggled at, like Martinsville and here, and running really, really well. I think when we get to the places that I feel like we're actually good at, it's going to be really, really good."
