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NASCAR’s No. 2 series has undergone a pretty successful transition to new sponsor Nationwide. Those B-word mentions are infrequent, but the championship points leader has been mentioned almost as infrequently. Clint Bowyer leads the standings, and has done so for most of the year.
I’ll admit my own fault in this. I’ve been more than happy to talk about the Joe Gibbs dominance and anxiously wait for David Ragan to finally win a race. But Bowyer’s year has been championship caliber.
He has 11 straight top 10s and only three finishes outside of the top 10, not once finishing worse than 25th. That, my friends, is impressive.
What may be giving most everyone trouble is that Bowyer’s year has been low key, matching his personality. He has no pole positions and just one win, which came at Bristol. Yet his 18 top 10 finishes blow everyone else out of the water, as Keselowski and Ragan are next behind him with 13.
His year reminds me of Matt Kenseth’s 2003 championship year. He goes about his business, records top 10 finishes, and doesn’t beat himself. Look at the results during this 11-race stretch: ninth, second, sixth, ninth, fourth, ninth, third, ninth, fourth, seventh, eighth.
Kenseth would go multiple races inside the top 10, and in his early season stretch in ’03—from Daytona through Michigan—he finished outside of the top 10 twice. Bowyer’s year has been the same, and is also similar to Kenseth's in another way: it hasn’t been covered.
Bowyer’s lead in the standings has been bouncing between 150 and 200 points. Currently, Keselowski sits in second place 170 markers out while Carl Edwards takes third, 201 back. In the final 14 races of the year, this one’s going to be won by one of those three.
Edwards seems to have regained his form after coasting the rest of the ’07 year and getting off to a sluggish start in ’08, recording two wins under new crew chief Drew Blickensdurfer since the change was made five races ago.
Keselowski has been no slouch, he has nine consecutive top 10s and hasn’t finished worse than 15th since Talladega. He also recorded his first career win at Nashville.
Bowyer might not win the Nationwide title this year, but I hope if he doesn’t, his performance through the first 21 races doesn’t become just a footnote. If he does win the title, it will be because of those finishes earlier in the year—the ones no one noticed.
Photo credit: Icon Sports Media
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