No team owner likes to see their driver getting hurt while racing. Things can get worse if their driver gets injured while racing outside their designated series. While speaking on a podcast interview a couple of years ago, Hendrick Motorsports boss Rick Hendrick explained how witnessing a Kyle Larson wreck made him question the risk taken by Cup Series drivers racing in the lower division dirt series’.
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Hendrick mentioned, “I have changed my mind because they learn so much by driving horsepower cars… The only negative to it is getting hurt. And I tell them, ‘Hey listen I’m not gonna stop you from doing it. But if you get hurt I gotta put somebody else in the car.’ So you just weigh the positives and the negatives is it worth the risk.”
Speaking further the HMS bossman mentioned, “Larson won a big race last Saturday night, one of the biggest sprint car races in the country and I Youtubed to see the end of the race. And they had this segment, Larson flipping so I punched it and it showed flips that he’d done crashes.”
“I said oh man and I sent him a note. I said, ‘Man you need to – I’m not sure I like this,’ and he said, ‘You are not supposed to be looking at that.'”
What happened to Alex Bowman in the 2023 season?
Bowman, just like Larson has a penchant for racing in the dirt series. However, during one of his races he managed to injure himself and was rendered out of his Hendrick Motorsports ride for quite a few important regular-season races. When he did get back in the car, Bowman faced problems to get back up to pace.
Not long after, the HMS driver was one of the two drivers who did not make it into the Cup Series playoffs, the other one being Chase Elliott. The Dawsonville native too missed out on several key races after suffering a snowboarding accident that jeopardized his 2023 campaign.
But if Elliott hadn’t gone snowboarding and Bowman hadn’t raced in the dirt series they could have perhaps had a much better year. If not fighting for the Championship they could have fielded all four Hendrick cars in the postseason.
