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Each week, The Athletic asks the same 12 questions to a different race car driver. Up next: Alex Bowman of Hendrick Motorsports, who on Sunday was eliminated from the NASCAR playoffs after his car was disqualified due to being underweight. This interview was conducted before that race and has been edited and condensed, but the full version is available on the 12 Questions podcast.
1. What is currently the No. 1 thing on your bucket list?
I’ve gotten to do a lot of cool things because of my job, but I don’t really have one big thing I want to do. Winning a Cup championship would be pretty cool. Hopefully we can make it happen.
2. How much media coverage of NASCAR do you consume?
It depends on how I finished the previous weekend. If we have a bad week, then very little. If we have a good week, then sometimes too much. Social media is really how I consume all of it. And it gets so toxic when things are tough. So during bad weeks, I try to stay away from it as much as I can.
I don’t know if there are ever any good weeks on social media, but I understand what you’re saying.
Yeah. I mean, even when we have good weeks, people just say why we shouldn’t have good weeks or that the good week is not good enough.
3. Beyond winning, what is the best way to measure success in racing?
Everybody’s situations are so different that sometimes just doing your job to the best of your ability and executing the way you need to throughout the race, depending on the situation, can also be a pretty good measure. Honestly, the hardest thing to do in Cup racing is to enjoy it. So trying to get to a point where you enjoy what you’re doing — if you’re running well and enjoying it at the Cup level, that’s a pretty good measure of success.
4. What is an opinion you have about NASCAR you don’t think is shared by the fans?
It’s been interesting reading some of the news this week (about the antitrust lawsuit filed against NASCAR). Some things fans thought were one way aren’t really that way. The fans think the drivers all get paid a ton of crazy money, which largely went away in the last 10 or 15 years. This side of the sport is quite a bit different than what the fans think at times.
But also what drivers want versus what fans want is so different, right? Fans want a bunch of overtimes and chaos and craziness all the time, and drivers don’t necessarily like that. A good example of that would be (the) Bristol spring race. I thought when I got out (of the car) that the fans were going to be pissed that we rode around half-throttle down the straightaway and didn’t run hard at all to try to make the tires live. Because I thought the fans would just be like, “What the heck? They can’t even run hard.” So I was shocked the fans liked that. The fans and drivers’ dislikes and likes get pretty disconnected at times.
5. What is the biggest thing fans don’t realize about what you do for a living?
Sometimes at the racetrack, I don’t think fans realize how many places we get shuffled around to really quickly. Appearance to appearance to appearance. You’re trying to sign for people as much as you can and getting pulled to different things. That gets pretty tough because sometimes you’re getting yelled at to get to the next thing and you want to sign for as many people as you can, but your PR person Autumn (Darracq) is standing over your shoulder dragging you to the next thing. (Darracq was standing nearby when he said this.) You get carted from Point A to Point B pretty non-stop.
6. This next one is a current topic related to you. I heard that over the Olympic break, you got stranded on a boat in the middle of a lake. Can you share this story?
We went to a really remote lake in South Carolina and there really weren’t any other boats out there. There were only like 30 houses on the lake and the lake was pretty big, so definitely remote. No cell phone service, up in the mountains. We were way back in a cove, really far from civilization. A storm hit, so we anchored and tried to let the storm pass. But then the boat wouldn’t re-fire afterward. All my intoxicated friends had a panic attack and were melting down because their phones wouldn’t work. The sun was going down and there weren’t any other people out there.
Thankfully, I have always tinkered with cars and worked on my own stuff and was able to diagnose we didn’t have any fuel pressure. So then I started going through fuses and relays and trying to make the fuel pump work, and I got it fired up and got it back to the dock.
You saved the day!
I mean, I changed a relay, so I can’t take too much credit. But yeah, glad that worked and that it was a relay and not actually the fuel pump. Because if it was actually the fuel pump, I think we were spending the night out on the boat and there were going to be some unhappy people for sure.
I don’t like when I get stranded by things, either. So I actually sold the boat on my way home. (Laughs.) I was like, “I’m not getting stranded ever again on that thing.”
Literally on the way home? You’re like, “I’m out?”
Yep. Traded it in on the way home. Once I get stranded on something, I’m like, “I can’t.” Especially a situation like that: Super remote and probably should have had a (satellite) phone for where we were. But my dumb a— didn’t think about that.
7. This is a wild-card question. So 10 years ago was our first 12 Questions interview and I asked you if you could give a piece of advice to your younger self, what would it be? You said, “To have more fun with it before it becomes a full-time job.” So 10 years later, what advice would you give to your younger self, now you’ve been through this a lot?
Still the same thing: Try to figure out how to have more fun, but I still haven’t learned. That’s the hardest part. And (10 years ago) was a massively different situation in my life at that point. Ten years ago, my career looked quite a bit different and I was still struggling to meet my own expectations.
Whatever anybody else’s expectations for me or my race team are, my personal expectations are always going to be higher than that. I’m never happy with what we’re doing. There’s always something I’m critical of or that I want to be better at, and even winning, sometimes it takes a little bit of the fun out of it or adds more stress. So I wish I could figure out how to have fun with it. But I’m just hyper-critical of a lot of things. (The win at) Chicago, I definitely figured out how to enjoy that one. But even some wins in the past I really haven’t enjoyed because there were things I wish I would have done better. …
This has been a therapy session brought to you by the 12 Questions. (Laughs.)
8. What do you like about the place you grew up? Tucson, Arizona.
That’s a really interesting question because I didn’t spend a lot of time there. I moved away when I was 16, but up until then, I was always traveling for racing. Obviously, I grew up riding dirt bikes a lot, so there’s a lot of land and desert area to go do that, which was pretty fun. The weather is nice. It’s not humid, which the humidity (in North Carolina) the last two weeks has been atrocious. I run a lot, so the last week and a half has been pretty miserable for that.
My whole family is still there, but I haven’t been to Tucson since 2020. My dad always yells at me for not coming home for Christmas, but I don’t make it back much.
9. What personality trait are you the most proud of?
I don’t know. I’m not good at bragging on myself for anything. Are any of my personality traits any good? Do I have any good ones?
You’re funny?
I’m funny?! OK! I think I’ve got the dry humor thing down pretty good. When (Matt) Kenseth came back in the middle of the season and drove the 42 (in 2020), we trained together a good bit. I love being around Matt Kenseth. To me, he has the funniest sense of humor with his dry wittiness. I try to be like that somewhat. That stuff is really funny at times. I like picking on people and having a good time.
“If we have a bad week, then very little,” Alex Bowman says of how much NASCAR media he consumes. “If we have a good week, then sometimes too much.” (Logan Riely / Getty Images)
10. Which driver would you least like to be stuck with on an elevator?
Does it have to be a driver?
I mean, if you have a great other candidate, I could take that.
I can’t see myself doing well stuck in an elevator with (Kaulig Racing president) Chris Rice. It would be really tough for me. He’d be like trying to do an Instagram Live and a selfie video of some sort the whole time. And I don’t know that I could do it. I’d be really uncomfortable. He would have the biggest smile of anybody who has ever been stuck in elevator, so he’s going to be my candidate. And I hope he reads this.
11. What is a run-in you’ve had with a driver that TV or the media missed?
NASCAR’s got so much coverage right now. I haven’t really had a big run-in with anybody that hasn’t been covered. Everybody races like an a— now. You understand why people do it, because you have to with this race car and track position is so important, but it still pisses you off the same amount. It’s so frustrating at times how people race today, but we all do it and choose to do it. So there’s been some of that stuff that’s certainly been frustrating at times, and there are guys I’ve been mad at, but I don’t think I’ve had a huge run-in with anybody. …
Did you know I had a run-in with Denny Hamlin once? Did you cover that? Maybe that one got swept under the rug. I crashed him at Martinsville.
12. Each week, I ask a driver to give me a question for the next interview. The last one was Kyle Busch. He wants to know: What is your favorite combo trip in terms of both the racetrack and cool stuff to do outside of the track?
I’m literally trying to buy a piece of land from Kyle Busch right now, and that is the best question he could come up with? That hurts.
Just going to Kansas (a couple weeks ago), I found a really cool running trail around a big lake in a state park not far from Kansas (Speedway). I run a lot, so that was really cool. I’m not a go-out-in-the-city or go-out-and-have-a-good-time type of guy while I’m at the racetrack. I’m typically pretty stuck in my bus, hanging out, making fun of my girlfriend Chloe or playing Nintendo Switch. There’s a lot of stuff right around the racetrack, too. Good coffee places, so that helps as well.
Are you referring to Dutch Brothers?
Yeahhhhh. It’s like you’re drinking a cup of sugar, but at the same time, it’s so good.
Do you have a question I can ask the next person?
That’s just lack of effort on your end to not know who is next, and that hurts my heart. I’ve got to be specific with it, so you’ve got to figure out who is next.
(Top photo of Alex Bowman at Talladega earlier this month: Chris Graythen / Getty Images)
