Clint Bowyer Wins Again at NASCAR’s Good Sam Club 500 at Talladega

Clint Bowyer took his first win of the season in the NASCAR Good Sam Club 500 from Talladega Superspeedway Sunday with a last-lap pass of teammate Jeff Burton, crossing the finish line just .018 seconds ahead after 188 laps of incident-filled racing.

While everyone else worried about a major wreck wiping out half the field, for Bowyer and Burton, it was a calm day which went according to plan.

“Thanks to my teammate Jeff Burton,” Bowyer told ESPN in Victory lane. “We were really good together. We thought about it, we talked about it a lot before the race and things really did play out just how we planned.

“It was a pretty calm day, just kind of methodical. I wanted to stay up front. I told him ‘We need to stay up front, stay racing with these guys so when the time comes, we’re practiced, we’re ready for it’.

“This is Chevrolet’s 100th anniversary and [team owner Richard Childress’s] 100 race that he’s won in the Cup Series. It meant a lot to me to get all these guys back in Victory Lane before we cap off this season.”

In a race typical of this season’s restrictor-plate contests, pairs of partners ruled the track, and on the final restart, two laps from the end, Bowyer found the rear bumper of race leader Burton while the rest of the field shuffled and searched. The two Richard Childress Racing drivers powered away from the rest of the field, making it a two-car race for the win.

“Out restart, we got bunched up before everybody else. I was really worried about especially the 14 the 27, they were hooked up; the Red Bull cars were hooked up—I didn’t think it was going to be like that but sure glad it was.

“I was trying to figure out where to pass him [Burton]. I said, ‘I‘m at least going to give him a shot at it—it’s going to be a drag race’.”

Bowyer made his move in the final turn, dropping inside his teammate, who nudged Bowyer a bit but let him by. Bowyer won the drag race down the home stretch and stole the win from a disappointed Burton, who hasn’t won a race since the end of 2008.

“Part of me wants to cry, part of me wants to cheer,” the second-place driver told ESPN. “Any time you leave here with your car in one piece you should be happy, but to come that close after the year we’ve had is pretty disheartening.”

The win was the 100th for RCR and the second Talladega win for Bowyer; he beat Kevin Harvick there in a photo finish in 2010.

The Chase Shuffle

Only five Chase drivers finished in the top 24 Sunday. Points leader Carl Edwards, driving in tandem with Greg Biffle, made the move many drivers hoped to: Biffle took Edwards from 23rd to 11th in the final two laps keeping him atop the leaderboard.

“Greg Biffle is amazing. He is just an unbelievable driver and the best teammate a guy could hope for,” Edwards told ESPN. “In that last dash to the finish Greg [Biffle] and I layed back. We wanted to get a Ford to Victory Lane but we thought we’d do our best by staying out of the wrecks. He just did an unbelievable job; communication was unreal. I just hope we can work together at these races from now on.”

Second-placed Kevin Harvick got caught up in a wreck with AJ Allmendinger, losing nine laps and falling to fifth in the points.

Matt Kenseth’s 18th-place finish earned him second in the points, 14 back. Brad Keselowski pushed David Blaney to third, Blaney’s best finish, and the points for fourth advanced Keselowski from sixth to third.

Johnson’s Sixth Seems Impossible

Possibly the biggest loser of the day was Jimmie Johnson, whose quest for a sixth consecutive title seems all but certainly thwarted. Johnson drove with teammate Dale Earnhardt Jr. in the back of the field for most of the race. With 19 to go, Johnson radioed Junior, “You want to wait a bit and let these guys crash or are you ready to go racing?” Earnhardt replied, “I’m in no big hurry to run up in there but I think we waited too long before.”

Seven laps later…