Kyle Larson is one of the drivers with the highest work rate in the NASCAR scene today. The Hendrick Motorsports driver averages around 80 races in a single season and manages to find an incredible amount of success in them, particularly in sprint cars. Though no one comes close to matching the balance he has across his wide racing spectrum, teammate Alex Bowman aspires to do so.
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Making his winged sprint car debut in 2021, the #48 Hendrick Motorsports man did his best to balance the out-of-NASCAR project with his Cup Series schedule but fell short with lackluster performances and a fractured vertebra. Owing to his strong want to be good in sprint cars he has knocked around enough thought to know where and what he lacks to be as good as Larson. And the answer he has come up with is “experience”.
Bowman is not entirely new to dirt racing. As a youngster, he raced in dirt and focus midgets across tracks in California and found success in them. However, the run did not last long as his attention was turned to pavement cars. A USAC midget race accident in the Las Vegas dirt track when he was 16 put a bolder full stop to his dirt hopes and left him with broken collarbones and ribs and collapsed lungs.
Detailing his unlucky past, he says, “I guess what I’m getting at is I wanted to go back and get better at it. Figure it out and I just didn’t have the reps and the races. I mean I’ve probably raced a dirt midget 15 times in my life. Not enough to be good at it.”
Bowman had got into the Chilli Bowl Nationals and winged Sprint Cars with the hope of finding his lost knack for dirt racing but once again, a wreck pushed the pause button after his Iowa accident early this year.
Kyle Larson’s experience outside NASCAR that Bowman envies
On the opposite end to Bowman’s experience sits Larson who ran riot in dirt racing even before he got to NASCAR. The #5 driver of Rick Hendrick made his Chili Bowl debut in 2008 when he was merely 15 years old. His engine sputtered to a start and went on to participate in multiple dirt tracks amassing wins in all of them. Larson’s career-high came when he won the 2020 and 2021 Lucas Oil Chili Bowl Nationals. 2022 continued seeing him run in 110 races across various disciplines.
Attributing Larson’s success to his past, Bowman said, “A lot of that comes from he grew up racing winged Sprint Cars.” Though Bowman is currently cornered to focus only on NASCAR, he hopes that he will someday come back to the dirt track and reach the level of Larson.
