Alex Bowman didn’t have enough time or friends to chase down Austin Dillon in the closing laps of Saturday night’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Richmond Raceway.
Bowman had moved into second position with 16 laps to go on the advantage of fresher tires. But the gap was nearly four seconds. It had only shrunk to 3.4 seconds by the time the field took the 10 laps to go signal.
Over the following few laps, Bowman wound up stuck behind lapped traffic, and spotter Kevin Hamlin relayed that he had asked for help in making way for Bowman. But the group of Erik Jones, Jesse Love, John Hunter Nemechek and Shane van Gisbergen ran their respective races and different lanes, at times running side-by-side, which did not help Bowman’s case.
“They’re not going to help,” Bowman said over the radio. “They hate us.”
Love was in a third Richard Childress Racing car, which was a teammate of Dillon. Bowman radioed at one point that Love was “blocking him” and it was race manipulation.
Van Gisbergen also raced Bowman side-by-side, and with van Gisbergen committed to the outside lane, it gave him momentum to continually battle or pass Bowman off the corners. It resulted in one member of Bowman’s team exclaiming over the radio, “All he needs to do is just give us the [expletive] exit. Why is this so hard with Team Chevrolet?”
Dillon’s margin of victory over Bowman was 2.4 seconds.
“A couple of favors and I sure complained about it on the radio, but that’s just part of what we do,” said Bowman of what he needed in the final laps. “I vented a little bit. But I had a really good Ally [No.] 48 there in that last run, and I just burnt the tires off too much in lapped traffic. I just didn’t get any breaks, and it made me kind of work the rears harder than I needed to, so I needed to be a little better there to get to him.