Alex Bowman really enjoyed learning the dirt Sprint Car game over the past couple of seasons but he is more than likely retired from racing 410s until his NASCAR career comes to a close.
Bowman broke his T3 vertebrae during a High Limit Sprint Car Series event at 34 Raceway, a 3/8-mile semi-banked clay track, in West Burlington, Iowa on April 25. His birthday. The incident cost him three weeks of seat time in the Hendrick Motorsports No. 48 and ultimately cost him a spot in the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs.
Denny Hamlin suffered a similar spinal injury in March 2013 at Auto Club Speedway and says he didn’t feel normal until the season finale that year in November at Homestead.
“I felt pretty good until I hit the front stretch chicane here,” Bowman said on Saturday after practice at the Charlotte Motor Speedway ROVAL. “I missed it a bit and made my life a little bit harder.
“I feel pretty good though. While I get sore here and there. I’m in good shape physically right now. I went for a 10-mile run this week and felt normal. I’m doing things I was doing before that I couldn’t do for a bit. I’m looking forward to improving on that the rest of the year.”
For the most part, Alex Bowman said he doesn’t feel any pain in the car but the road courses are the obvious exceptions.
“After the Indy Road Course, I was sore for a few days,” Bowman said. “That’s just from the huge braking zones but I have felt pretty good beyond that.”
After the incident, and the snowboarding incident that cost Chase Elliott time this season, Hendrick Motorsports vice chairman Jeff Gordon has been adamant that he isn’t going to put limits on their drivers’ extracurricular activities.
With that said, Gordon also said last week that he expected his drivers to police themselves.
“I believe they have to have a certain degree of responsibility over their own choices and decisions,” Gordon told SiriusXM NASCAR Radio last week. “It’s like, ‘Hey guys, we want you to come to the race track as well-prepared as you can possibly be to drive the race car.’ That’s physically, mentally, and balanced in every way possible.
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“That means you have to have a home life and friends, families, and relationships; activities that contribute to that. Throughout my career I snowboarded and I still snowboard. Now when I fall, I do get injured.”
He said that to great laughter around the room.
“I don’t have a problem with the things they do. Just be smart about it and make wise choices as he does it. When I picked Chase’s brain about what happened, I don’t think he could have done anything different.
“Is he going to make different choices now that he’s been out of the car and seen how it impacted his season? Maybe and that’s on him.”
Alex Bowman has certainly made that choice.
“Laying in a hospital bed at midnight in the middle of Iowa on your birthday and being unable to find a doctor that can immediately read your X-ray gives you a little bit of perspective,” Bowman said. “You start to evaluate if the things you’re spending your own money on are worth it or not.
“I will get back to that but not when it can take me out of one of those things.”
After his NASCAR career is over?
“Yeah, probably,” Bowman said. “I don’t want to end on that note. I would like to get back to racing those things someday. They were really fun and it was a fun challenge, unnatural for me and I do want to make that not the last memory I have of racing one.”
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.