Hendrick Motorsports makes Alex Bowman change | Sports News

Hendrick Motorsports is shaking issues up within the No. 48 storage after a sequence of inexcusable errors have positioned Alex Bowman on the brink of playoff elimination.

Despite displaying flashes of brilliance during final weekend’s Enjoy Illinois 300 — during which Denny Hamlin secured a thrilling victory by narrowly heading off Chase Briscoe — Bowman finds himself 35 factors under the cutline getting into Saturday’s NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs Round of 16 elimination race at Bristol Motor Speedway.

The 32-year-old — whose latest statement may place two Trackhouse Racing drivers in scorching water — is leaving no stone unturned heading into the Bass Pro Shops Night Race, having fully gutted his pit-crew personnel and changed them with 4 new staffers.

This weekend at Bristol Motor Speedway, Bowman’s No. 48 Chevrolet staff will function Daniel Bach (entrance changer), Rod Cox (rear changer), Jarius Morehead (tire provider), Cody French (jack), and Jacob Conley (fueler). The group of pit-crew members beforehand labored on Carson Hocevar’s No. 77 Chevrolet, with Hendrick Motorsports presently supplying every of Spire Motorsports’ three groups with pit-crew athletes.

In back-to-back weeks, Bowman’s promising days on the observe have been ruined by pricey mental gaffes on the pit lane. During the Cook Out Southern 500, he was pressured to accept a P31 end following a 40-second stop brought on by a defective air hose that turned disconnected.

Then, during a mid-race stop at World Wide Technology Raceway, the jack on Bowman’s car dropped into place earlier than the left-rear wheel was totally mounted, leading to one other prolonged stop that induced him to drop from seventh place to thirtieth within the area.

“It was just really poor execution on all angles today, it was a bummer,” Bowman stated after ending twenty sixth within the Enjoy Illinois 300. “I thought our No. 48 Ally Chevrolet was okay once we were kind of towards the front-half. We just struggled in the back.

“Super frustrating, but all we can do is keep digging. There’s a lot of people working really hard to continue to be better. I thought, race car-wise, we were heading in the right direction once we had some air on it. We just have to go to Bristol (Motor Speedway) and go to work.”

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Bowman, to his credit, stopped short of laying all of the blame on his pit-crew members’ shoulders. “[My] guys are really fast,” he instructed RACER. “They look really awesome in all the metrics, and they work really hard. It’s just the ones that blow up are really bad. It’s unfortunate. We’ve got to go to Bristol and keep working at it.”

Fortunately for Bowman, he’s now in line to obtain a much-needed improve. According to champion racing mechanic Bozi Tatarevic, the No. 77 Chevrolet pit crew ranked because the quickest non-playoff crew final Sunday whereas additionally boasting the third-fastest average of all groups.