Bowman cleared for Bristol

Alex Bowman climbed out of his car at Circuit of the Americas on March 1 after vertigo symptoms hit mid-race, and four Cup weekends later Hendrick Motorsports says he is cleared to get back in for Bristol on Sunday, April 12. The team put him straight back into the No. 48 Ally Chevrolet after medical testing this week. (nascar.com) Vertigo is not a sore wrist or a bruised shoulder. It is the kind of dizziness that can make a still room feel like it is moving, which is a brutal problem when your job is judging braking points and traffic at nearly 130 miles per hour on a half-mile oval. (wcyb.com) Bowman missed Phoenix Raceway, Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Darlington Raceway, and Martinsville Speedway while Hendrick waited for the symptoms to settle. Hendrick first said on March 17 that he would sit out at least three races, then the absence stretched to four before this clearance arrived on April 9. (hendrickmotorsports.com 1) (hendrickmotorsports.com 2) The fill-in driver was Justin Allgaier, who kept the No. 48 on track for the last three races while Bowman recovered. Bowman had already missed Phoenix before that, which is why the total reached four even though Hendrick’s March announcement only covered the next three events. (hendrickmotorsports.com) (frontstretch.com) Hendrick did not just ask Bowman how he felt and hand over the keys. The team said he turned laps in a street car at Ten Tenths Motor Club in Concord, North Carolina, practiced pit stops on Wednesday, ran simulator sessions, and then passed a medical evaluation. (hendrickmotorsports.com) (aol.com) That matters extra at Bristol because Bristol is the opposite of a gentle comeback track. The concrete oval is just 0.533 miles long, the Food City 500 is scheduled for 500 laps on Sunday at 3 p.m. Eastern, and traffic comes at drivers so fast that one bad restart can wreck an afternoon. (nascar.com) (tennessean.com) Bowman comes back with a lot of ground to make up. NASCAR said he sits 36th in the Cup standings with a best finish of 23rd at EchoPark Speedway in only three starts this season, which is what four missed races does to a points table built like an attendance sheet. (nascar.com) The good news for Bowman is that Bristol has been one of his steadier tracks in the Next Gen car era. Yahoo’s summary of the return noted that he has scored the seventh-most Cup Series points at Bristol across the last eight races with this rules package, so this is not a random place to restart a season. (sports.yahoo.com) The return also resets Hendrick Motorsports back to its normal four-driver lineup for a weekend where Kyle Larson is the defending Bristol Cup winner. When one Hendrick car has been running with a substitute, the team can still function, but the full operation looks more like itself when the No. 48 is back in its usual hands. (speedwaymedia.com) (hendrickmotorsports.com) So the story going into Bristol is not just that a driver is healthy enough to race again. It is that Bowman’s season, which looked like it was slipping away one empty Sunday at a time after March 1, now gets restarted at one of the loudest and least forgiving tracks on the schedule. (wcnc.com) (motorsport.com)