Bowman Uneasy With Playoff Uncertainty Going Into Regular Season Finale

Alex Bowman, who will officially start second in Saturday's NASCAR Cup Series Coke Zero Sugar 400 at Daytona International Speedway after Friday's qualifying session was canceled due to inclement weather, doesn't hide the fact that he's uncomfortable as the final driver inside the NASCAR Cup Series Playoff cutline.

Starting Lineup: Coke Zero Sugar 400 at Daytona

Despite 14 top-10 finishes this season, which is the second-most of any driver in the series this season (Kyle Larson leads the series with 15), the 32-year-old racer is in jeopardy of being bumped from a chance to battle for the Bill France Cu p if a driver outside the cutline is able to shove their way to a win in the closing laps of Saturday night's regular-season finale.

"It's just stressful, right? And I'm going to stress myself out about whatever our situation ever is," Bowman said in a media scrum on Friday afternoon in the Daytona International Speedway media center.

However, regardless of how things turn out on Saturday night, Bowman doesn't want it to take away from what he, crew chief Blake Harris, and the No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports team have accomplished this season.

"I think the best way to look at it is like, if we were running 25th and we showed up here in a must-win situation, that would be one thing. But we're running really well and doing a lot of really good things. Don't want to morrow night's result kind of mess that all up if it's not what we want," Bowman explained. "There's so much outside of our control."

Bowman, a native of Tucson, AZ, isn't fibbing. NASCAR superspeedway racing is as unpredictable of an affair that any professional athlete can compete in. Around every corner is a threat of a monstrous crash, dubbed The Big One, which is the result of ultra-tight packs of cars due to the restriction of horsepower given to the race cars at this style of track.

A ticking timebomb waiting to pop in the form of a crash, combined with the draft creating a great equalizer of sorts, which allows virtually every car in the field to compete with a chance to win, has Bowman facing the most uncertain evening of his season, and potentially his ca reer.

However, the driver simply decompartmentalized things this week, and worked on the tangibles that he is able to control.

"For me, I just focused on preparing as much as I could, being super-prepared to go into tomorrow night and execute on all of the things I can control, correctly, and kind of go from there," Bowman said.

While the stress is weighing on him heavily this weekend, Bowman says he has thankfully had a lot of distractions this week, which has kept his mind clear heading into the uncertainty of the Coke Zero Sugar 400.

"Well, it's been a super busy week. Tested Kershaw on Tuesday, so that was a whole day of testing. Wednesday, we had a production day deal at Hendrick, and then yesterday kind of just had a bunch of regular life s--- that I had to do," Bowman laughed. "Yeah, I mean, I think it being busy, as much as I've complained about that all week becaus e I've been like running all over the Earth all week, it's probably a good thing that it was that way. Yeah, took my mind off of it."

Bowman will kick off Saturday night's NASCAR Cup Series regular-season finale from the front row of the field, and he has the comfort of knowing that if he, Tyler Reddick or any of the 14 drivers who are locked into the Playoffs wins the race, he'll advance to the Playoffs for the seventh time in the last eight seasons. This means he essentially only has to worry about the potential of 20 of the drivers in the field, who could spoil his hopes of advancing into the Playoffs.