All not lost for Bowyer, Jack Daniel’s Chevy 
in UAW-Dodge 400

Race/Date: UAW-Dodge 400 - Location: Las Vegas Motor Speedway – Las Vegas
Start Position: 21st - Finish Position: 28th - Points Position: 23rd (Fell four spots)

Las Vegas – Sometimes it takes a little while to work the bugs out of a new race car. Unfortunately for Clint Bowyer and the Jack Daniel’s racing team, that little while turned out to be the first 170 miles in Sunday’s UAW-Dodge 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

Despite losing two laps early in the race as a result of an exceptionally temperamental-handling Jack Daniel’s Chevrolet Impala SS, Bowyer and company kept their collective heads in the game and logged a hard-earned 28th-place finish.

Bowyer made hard contact with the turn 2 wall with only minutes remaining in Saturday’s final practice session, forcing his Gil Martin-led team to unload its back up – a brand new car that had yet to make a single lap around any race track.

After posting top-10 times in both practices on Saturday, Martin felt he had a good handle on what it would take to get the new car up to speed for Sunday’s 400-miler. Unfortunately, the new car didn’t respond the same way the primary car did and, when the green flag dropped shortly after 1:30 p.m. local time, Bowyer struggled mightily in the early goings.

By lap 30, the third-year Sprint Cup Series driver lost a lap to leader and eventual winner Carl Edwards and was two laps down 60 laps in. Bowyer’s main complaint was the car was suffering from a very loose condition which hampered his efforts to drive the car into the corners.

Martin made wholesale changes to the car’s chassis with every pit stop and just before the halfway mark, the team heard good news from the cockpit and on the stopwatch – the car was tight exiting the corner and Bowyer was turning in lap times competitive with teams running in the top 15.

The goal then became to “snug up” the black and white Richard Childress Racing (RCR) prepared Chevrolet getting in the corner so Bowyer could race with the leaders and attempt to get one of his two laps back.

With a little more than 100 laps to go, Bowyer was running top-five lap times but was still two laps down to the leaders. Martin knew the only way to get a lap back would be to gamble on pit road, take two tires when everyone else took four and try to pass the leader and stay ahead of him before another caution flag waved.

The plan was in place but the cards never fell in Bowyer and company’s favor. In spite of their noble effort, Lady Luck didn’t smile on Mr. Jack’s crew and they couldn’t get a lap back. However, perseverance did pay off in the form of a handful of spots.

Four caution flags in the closing 42 laps, for incidents involving cars running ahead of the Jack Daniel’s Chevy, afforded the team a handful of positions allowing them to log a gutty but disappointing 28th-place finish.

Carl Edwards notched his second consecutive win in as many weeks with Dale Earnhardt Jr. finishing second. Greg Biffle was third and Bowyer’s RCR teammates Kevin Harvick and Jeff Burton rounded out the top five.

Next weekend the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series visits Atlanta Motor Speedway for round 4 on the 36-race schedule.

Live coverage of Kobalt Tools 500 will be televised on FOX Sunday, March 9 beginning at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT). The race will be broadcast live on the Performance Racing Network (PRN) and Sirius Satellite Radio. Qualifying will be televised live on SPEED Friday, March 7 beginning at 6:30 p.m. EDT.

• CLINT BOWYER QUOTES

“We missed it early on. I got into the wall with the primary car on Saturday and we didn’t have any time with the back up so Gil (crew chief Gil Martin) did his best to try and duplicate what we had under the primary but the back up just didn’t respond the same way. The guys got it dialed in pretty good by about halfway but, as hard as we tried, we couldn’t get back on the lead lap. The good thing is now we’ve got a better idea how we can get going a little faster if that happens again so regardless of the end result, we made some significant gains.”