Alex Bowman and the Hendrick Motorsports No. 48 team entered the Round of 16 elimination race at Bristol Motor Speedway with their backs up against the wall. With an eventful prior to races, Bowman entered the weekend believing he was in must-win mode.
The postseason began with a disastrous 40-second pit stop for the No. 48 pit crew at Darlington Raceway, and an ill-handling car dropped to Bowman to 31st in the finishing order. Last week at World Wide Technology at Gateway, Bowman had another disheartening 26th-place effort and a second slow pit stop. Hendrick Motorsports made adjustments leading into Bristol, swapping all of its No. 48 crew members with the No. 77 Spire Motorsports team — a Hendrick Motorsports developmental pit crew — besides the fueler Jacob Conley.
In a thrilling 500-lap battle that featured an abundance of tire wear, Bowman rallied from early in the race, going a lap down during Stage 1. Contact from Riley Herbst, sent Bowman around at Lap 100 to bring out the caution.
Throughout the second stage, Bowman continued leaping up the scoring chart, finishing third in the stage, trailing only Ty Gibbs and Ryan Blaney, who split the first two stage wins.
With the laps winding down, Blake Harris, crew chief of the No. 48 car, called a late audible, pitting Bowman for the final time with 28 laps remaining after reaching the runner-up spot. Bowman was able to make up two laps on race leader Brad Keselowski and elected to stay out when the final caution flew with 12 laps remaining.
As Hocevar and Zane Smith split the front row for the final restart with four laps remaining, Bowman chose the outside of the second row. At the drop of the green, the two leaders washed up the track, and a slight nudge from Brad Keselowski moved Bowman to the high groove. The No. 48 car dropped to eighth, 10 points shy of advancing to the Round of 12 on points.
“I don’t think you can really point at something that cost us,” Bowman told NBC Sports of his eighth-place finish. “Being out of tires at the end isn’t good, and honestly, we just played the hand that we could and stayed out.
“Hats off to our whole Ally 48 team. They did a good job throughout the course of the day and trying to be better after a rough last two weeks, and I think we swung it the right direction, and we can continue to do that for the next seven weeks. We’ve just got to keep digging. Certainly sucks to not transfer, but our back was against the wall coming in here. We knew it was going to be a tough thing to do.”
Bowman is the lone Hendrick driver not to advance to the Round of 12. He thought the opening two races of the playoffs were going to be sluggish. In the previous eight Darlington events leading into the Southern 500, he had a pair of top 10 finishes. And while Hendrick believes it gained ground at the shorter, flat tracks comparable to Gateway, historically, it’s been a weaker spot for the No. 48 team, as Bowman has an average finish of 23.3 through four St. Louis starts.
The streaky No. 48 team got eliminated from the playoffs after scoring seven top-10 finishes in the final 11 regular-season races. In that span, Bowman had a quartet of top five finishes, including a runner-up result to Austin Dillon last month at Richmond Raceway.
“We’re a plenty capable race team a lot of the time, and just the last two weeks we’ve just not been very good,” Bowman added. “I thought those tracks would be a little tough for us but not how they were.
“Even coming [to Bristol], we were typically a good bit better than we were tonight and yesterday when we come here. We have some work to do on our race cars, but everybody is always working, getting better, and tires change and the field changes. I think this summer we were so fast every week that I’m a little surprised to be down on speed, but the guys work really hard, and we’ll keep digging on it.”
Bowman has won at two of the final seven race tracks on the 2025 slate.