Subscribe to RSSClint Bowyer is in for the chase
Begin With Your Heart. That’s the slogan Cheerios uses to promote its heart healthy oats cereal. It’s also a safe bet that NASCAR driver Clint Bowyer, who drives under the sponsorship of Cheerios, begins each race with his heart firmly placed in the sport he so loves.
And though Bowyer says he approaches each race with a calm, professional demeanor, there’s no doubt his heart is pumping and the adrenaline is coursing through his veins as he pushes his Chevrolet Impala SS to the limits. Bowyer began racing motocross at the age of 4, so after some 27 years of racing, there’s a certain confidence as he watches for the green flag to drop.
“I’ve learned patience,” the 30-year-old Emporia, KS, native said. “I’ve learned patience the hard way. When I first came into the sport, I was used to a 25-lap feature on a dirt track. You went like hell from the very first lap.”
Today, facing 500 laps around tracks like Daytona, Bowyer says “you have to give and take and make sure you’re there at the end of the race. The first couple of laps is when you get things settled in and the cars space out, and you figure out what you have for a race car.”
Like so many other professional racecar drivers, Bowyer’s love of the sport was born through ties with family and friends. And total support from his parents.
Bowyer’s father owned (and still does) a towing service in Emporia, KS. A friend named Tony Reynolds raced motocross and had a practice course behind his dad’s shop. Bowyer and his two brothers, like most little boys, wanted to hang out with their dad and often went to his shop.
“Tony would be back there practicing after work and we’d go down and watch. Pretty soon, my older brother and I got motorcycles for Christmas and we were soon racing around that track,” he recalled.
“Obviously, it was Dad’s first love as well. Racing has been good to our family. We’ve met a lot of great people over the years and the relationships carry on forever. We still have a lot of friends and families we talk to every day.”
There’s a cliché that the family that plays together stays together. Well, it’s the same for the family of racecar drivers.
“It’s interesting, all the people you meet and all the relationships. Usually, the stories you remember about racing go way back to the earliest days of racing, because those were the days of just having fun,” he said.
Bowyer talks of long-time friend Ricky Carmichael who was a motocross racer the same time the Bowyer family was involved. They grew up racing together even though they lived miles apart, Bowyer in Kansas and Carmichael in Florida. The families often met at motocross nationals and would spend several weeks together every year.
“It’s kind of funny, actually,” Bowyer explained. “When I started car racing, he went down the career path of motocross and became the best racer ever, and I mean ever. Now, all of a sudden, he’s back racing in NASCAR and our families are back together. It’s weird how it’s all come together after all these years.”
Bowyer was getting “pretty good” at motocross and raced in Oklahoma and Texas to find good competition. However, he quickly learned how serious many families took the sport. Parents home schooled their children so the boys could practice their skills every day. Bowyer’s parents appreciated the importance of public education and left their boys in school.
“We’d get outrun and beaten by these kids who practiced every day,” he recalled. “I got tired of getting beat, so I found something else — racing cars.”
At about 13 years of age, Bowyer started working at Floyd’s Body Shop in Emporia where he learned to be a body man, and then worked at a Goodyear tire store. His boss at Goodyear raced in an entry level street stock competition. Bowyer quickly found that running dirt tracks with friends and family was fun, and he soon got hooked. “The next thing I new I built my first race car and got my first shot at it, then I started winning.
In the early days, it was just my mom and me. She’d go with me to the dirt tracks while Dad took my other brothers motocross racing,” he explained. “Eventually, my dad got involved in racing cars and business picked up. We got to winning and one thing led to another. We won races. I was always moving up a class, race a year or two, and then move up a class.”
In 2002, Bower realized for the first time that racing was what he wanted to do for a living. He was gaining a reputation on the track after a big win on dirt at Lakeside Speedway in Kansas City, and then a win on asphalt at the I-70 Speedway east of Kansas City. That’s when his racing career began to turn around. Sonic Drive-In became a sponsor and wins on both dirt and asphalt garnered some national attention. He talked Scott Racing Team into letting him drive in the Nashville Superspeedway race where “we almost won.” Bowyer led with 10 laps to go, and finished second.
“We went down there with almost nothing, and still nearly won,” he said.
And here’s where his career took a mighty turn. As Bowyer explains it:
Almost every year during Pocono (PA) International Speedway competition, it rains at least one day. On one of those rainy days, Richard Childress (owner of Richard Childress Racing) was in his motor home watching the Nashville race that Bowyer nearly won. A couple of weeks later, Bowyer’s phone rang.
Now, anyone who knows Bowyer knows he likes to play practical jokes. He and others were standing in a body shop in Kansas when the phone rang. A woman with a southern voice asked if he would take a call from Richard Childress.
“I thought it was a prank call,” Bowyer said. “I’m like, yeah, right, who the hell is this, ya know? I all but hung up.”
The woman, who turned out to be Childress’ secretary, said “no, no, no. I’m serious.” The next voice on the phone was Childress who laughingly asked Bowyer if he really was about to hang up?
“No, sir, no, sir,” Bowyer recalls stuttering into the phone.
“That was the phone call that changed my life. It was a pretty cool conversation, obviously one I never thought I’d have.
He was my hero. If you raced around that time, the legacy that he and Dale Earnhardt had together, that’s who you wanted to race for. You wanted to race for the guy who owned Dale Earnhardt’s car.”
Bowyer is coming off a “horrible year” for RCR. The team won a couple of nationwide races, but “that’s not nearly enough. Cup racing is how you pay the bills and that’s what they pay you to do.”
Organizational and management changes within RCR seem to be making a difference. All three RCR drivers were running in the Top 5 late in the 2009 season. “There is a lot of optimism coming into a new year. As we learn more, we see better results,” he explained.
Daytona opened the NASCAR season in mid-February, with Bowyer and the RCR team in the chase and leading the pack. Bowyer finished in fourth, a great start to the 2010 season.
“It’s the points championship we seek. You’re always chasing something. You’re obviously there to win on any given weekend, but you’re also there to get the most out of that weekend in hopes of chasing that championship at the end of the year because that’s The Big One,” Bowyer said.
It’s been a wild ride for the Kansan who probably never dreamed when racing his first motocross at 4 years old that by age 30 he would be representing one of the top NASCAR teams in the country.
0 Comments
You can be the first one to leave a comment.