Alex Bowman and Kyle Busch have talked things out following Busch’s expletive-laced rant about Bowman on his team radio Sunday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, moments after he lost to Bowman in an overtime finish.
Busch, who finished fourth, had been leading when the caution flag came out for a wreck with three laps left in the race’s scheduled distance.
After pit strategy that saw Bowman and two Hendrick Motorsports teammates take two tires while Busch took four, Bowman beat Kyle Larson for his first NASCAR Cup win of the year and his seventh overall.
Bowman is now known for clinching wins late, which was the theme of Busch’s anger.
“I talked to Kyle on Monday night and he was just mad to have lost the race, he wasn’t mad at me,” Bowman said Wednesday on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio’s “On-Track.” “I didn’t do anything to him, Kyle and I have always raced each other with respect and he was just mad that he lost the race and I was the one on the other end of the rant. Obviously, Kyle’s really passionate and we’ve seen that from him for for a long time and I was in the fire on that one. But he basically said he was just mad about losing the race and didn’t mean to be so disrespectful to me.”
However, this wasn’t the first time Bowman’s been the subject of a Joe Gibbs Racing driver’s ire. Just five months ago, Bowman was called a “hack” by Denny Hamlin after the final playoff elimination race at Martinsville Speedway. Bowman had made contact with Hamlin and spun him while they raced for the lead. Bowman wound up winning.
“As far as Denny goes, like I crashed him. I got loose and screwed up and crashed him. I understand him being mad about that,” Bowman said. “I think Denny got super personal and crossed all the lines, but at the same time I understand why he was mad.”
For Bowman, being able to turn these controversial moments “into a positive” is important.
On Monday, Bowman released a new shirt for sale. Designed to look like an old fashioned Las Vegas strip sign, it says: “Alex Bowman: All Luck, No Skill.” In a tip of the hat to Busch, 18% of the proceeds will go to animal shelters, one of Bowman’s passions. That comes after Bowman produced a “Hack” shirt following the Hamlin episode.
(Busch is also selling shirts for 48% off on his website).
Family sport friendly… 18% of the proceeds backing into an animal shelter near you https://t.co/YTNdSOowYQ
— Alex Bowman (@Alex_Bowman) March 7, 2022
“Obviously, with the ‘Hack’ shirts we were able to buy all my team guys Martinsville clocks and then donate the rest to Best Friends (a pet-based charity) and then with this shirt we’re donating 18% to local shelters, so cool to be able to raise the money for homeless pets,” Bowman said. “It’s been fun to see all the fan interaction with the T-shirts because we’re definitely selling a lot of them.”
As for his on-track adventures with Hendrick Motorsports, the 28-year-old driver feels like he’s “playing with house money” at this point in his career. His seven Cup wins have come in his first 158 starts for Hendrick and come after multiple years driving for backmarker teams, plus time waiting in the wings at Hendrick to take over for Dale Earnhardt Jr.
“The way my careers kind of went, I feel like I’m not that guy that’s gonna get looked at as this amazing race car driver and I’m not sometimes gonna get credit that I feel like I might deserve,” Bowman told SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. “I think the frustrating times between the wins are kind of what stick out to me more than the wins, just because I’m really driven and motivated to try to find the consistency to be able to chase a championship and felt like we kind of had that at the end of 2020 with a great playoff run and then struggled with that last year.”
Five of Bowman’s wins have been since the start of the 2021 season. Meanwhile, drivers such as Busch and Hamlin have combined to win four times during that same span.
“It’s been amazing to be able to win so many races here lately and win at such cool racetracks, racetracks that I’ve struggled at in the past and special places,” Bowman said. “We want a whole lot more of that, but it’s definitely special to have been able to accomplish all this so far. Especially kind of considering where my career came from and was at for quite a while. I’m kind of playing with house money at this point, just with being able to achieve more than I really thought I was ever going to be able to do.”
Bowman will try to follow up his Vegas win with a victory at his home track, Phoenix Raceway.
A native of Tuscon, Arizona, Bowman turned heads in 2016 at Phoenix during his stint as a substitute driver for Earnhardt. Bowman claimed the pole in the fall Phoenix race and led 194 laps before he finished sixth. But in eight starts on the one-mile track since then Bowman’s never finished better than 13th.
“I think at Phoenix I kind of have backed myself into a corner, time and time again, of getting the car away too free and getting super loose on entry, and then kind of ruining the rest of the corners,” Bowman said. “So I think this year I’ve really tried to look at data and pick things apart that my teammates do, and tried to go their direction, because obviously what I’ve been doing hasn’t worked. So glad to be going there with a new race car to kind of start fresh and not have to try to tweak a similar thing and come up with a new theory for what we’re missing.”