Alex Bowman continued the tradition of putting the #48 Hendrick Motorsports in victory lane at Dover International Speedway on Sunday with his win of the Drydene 400. The win was Bowman’s first at Dover but the 12th for the #48 HMS Chevrolet, adding to retired seven-time NASCAR Cup Series champion Jimmie Johnson’s record 11 wins at the track. Sunday’s victory also was Bowman’s second of 2021, joining Martin Truex Jr. as the only multi-race winners in the first half of the 26-race regular season.
“We won Richmond and, then, had a really rough couple of weeks, there,” Bowman said. “We went to some really good race tracks for us and struggled. I told the guys last week, ‘We’re still the same team that did it at Richmond,’ This is another really good place for us. I’m just so pumped for Ally. It feels right to put the 48 back in victory lane here after how many races that this car has won here.
“Mr. H [team owner Rick Hendrick] is here. I don’t think I’ve won with him here before, so that’s really cool. Just so proud of this pit crew. It was, obviously, a rough off season for us and a big void to fill. Not that we’re ever going to fill the void that Rowdy [Harrell, a pit crew member who died in an auto accident during the offseason] left, but Allen is doing a really good job, and the whole pit crew is doing a really good job. Thanks to my spotter, Kevin Hamlin, for couching me, there, at the end. It was fun racing Kyle [Larson] and glad to get Hendrick Motorsports another win.”
Hendrick Motorsports drivers finished in the top-four positions, with Kyle Larson taking runner-up honors after leading 263 laps of the 400-lap race. Chase Elliott was third after dropping to the back for the initial green flag because of two pre-race inspection failures. William Byron was fourth. The feat marked the fourth time a single team has finished first through fourth in a race at NASCAR’s top level but the first time for Hendrick Motorsports.
Joey Logano was the best of the rest, rounding out the top-five.
“We had some debris go through the grille early in the race, so we were pretty good beforehand and, then, knocked a big hole in the nose, and that’s why the turn went away, so it took a while to repair that and get everything to where it needed to be, and we didn’t really get that until the last run, and it’s a rocket ship,” Logano said. ”The Shell/Pennzoil Mustang was really fast. I was able to drive from, I think, it was 16th to fifth in that last run, there, and had the 24 [Byron] in the old sights, but didn’t get there in time. Overall, very proud of the team and their recovery today. We definitely got dealt some adversity, and we made the most of it. I wish it was a win. I wish we, maybe, could have raced those guys, but overall, we’ll take that, considering the way it was going.”
After pole sitter Truex and Byron led laps early, Larson got off pit road first during a lap-35 competition caution and led until a lap-302 caution for Aric Almirola. Bowman beat his teammate and everyone else off pit road to run up front for the remaining 98 laps.
“I’m okay,” Almirola said. ”That was another hard hit. My body is hurting. It doesn’t want to take any more hard hits like that. It’s just such a trying year. I don’t know what exactly happened. I think something in the suspension broke. It wasn’t like a right-front went down. It wasn’t like all of a sudden. A couple laps before that, I felt like I was laying on the splitter pretty hard, which is unusual that far into a run, and I kind of mentioned it on the radio and, then, went down into turn three, the worst possible place. Well, there’s no good place at Dover to have a suspension failure or a tire go down. but our guys deserve so much better. Our partners, Smithfield, Ford, everybody, Go Bowling, Pit Boss Grills, everybody that helps us deserves so much better. We’re so much more capable, but God is really testing us this year.”
Larson claimed stage wins at laps 120 and 240. At the halfway point of the race, the Hendrick quartet of drivers were top-four in the running order and still were top-four at the end of the second stage.
One of Truex’s Joe Gibbs Racing teammates, Kyle Busch, ran laps comparable in speed to the frontrunners in the second half of the race, but because of an engine issue in the first 30 laps, he was seven laps down.
The yellow flag waved six times in Sunday’s race, including four cautions for single-car incidents. In addition to the Almirola caution, the yellow flag waved on the final lap of the first 120-lap stage for Chase Briscoe, for Josh Berry on lap 171 and for Anthony Alfredo on lap 314.
Finishing the Drydene 400 sixth through 10th were Kevin Harvick, Denny Hamlin, Tyler Reddick, Daniel Suarez and Cole Custer.
“We probably had a fifth to sixth place FedEx Camry,” Hamlin said. “Harvick and I kind of battled to see who was going to be next behind the Hendrick cars. We just thought we would try to get a tire advantage, there, and we came out ninth, and we were really slow on the short run. Our car wasn’t very fast for 20-30 laps. We kind of just held in ninth, and another caution came. I thought, maybe, we should pit to double our tire advantage, but then, we would have restarted 15th, and again, we weren’t fast on new tires. I just don’t know how it would have turned out any better or worse than seventh, where we ended up.”
Darrell “Bubba” Wallace Jr. finished 11th, the best for new team, 23XI Racing.
“I thought our balance was good enough to keep us right there at the edge of the lead lap,” Wallace said. “Cautions definitely felt our way to keep us in the game. That gave us a mental reset, but as the runs went on, we noticed that our speed was top-10 lap times. It’s just so hard to pass and make ground when everybody’s fighting for half-a-tenth to a tenth. It was a good call by Wheels [Mike Wheeler, crew chief] and the team to keep us out late, and I was able to hang on. I had to fight some guys off to salvage that finish, but that is what it takes. You have to stay mentally tough all day long. Everybody’s going to test you. It was a good day for our McDonald’s Toyota team.”
