After tough day, Clint Bowyer finds second at Sonoma 'really good'

Clint Bowyer ended up finishing second in Sunday’s Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Sonoma Raceway, but not before he endured an eventful day getting there.

Bowyer’s No. 14 Stewart-Haas Racing Ford was all over the 1.99 road course – and even off it at times – bouncing off at least one car and getting spun out by another.

But a long green-flag run toward the end of the race played into his favor, and he was able to give SHR a 1-2 finish after teammate Kevin Harvick took the checkered flag.

“Well, let's face it, short runs have never been my strong suit here; the long runs are, and thank God we got a long run there. I was out of tires,” Bowyer said. “By the time I got done tearing the hell out of my car, I was out of tires.”

Bowyer said stage racing was to blame, as this was the first time NASCAR has attempted a three-stage race on the Sonoma road course.

“Those stages … obviously, this is the first crack at it.  That's what leads to tore-up race cars,” Bowyer said of the stages, which were divided into 25, 25 and then the final 72 laps of the 112-lap race Sunday. “(The first two are) such a short stage, there was some technical strategy that you've got to try to play and get track position, and then all of a sudden you're on the bad side of tires trying to hold guys off and you're blocking. They're stacked up behind them, and it's just a recipe for disaster.

“You know, the 47 car (of AJ Allmendinger) down there, I just didn't see him and knocked the whole front end off our car. Somebody else I had a really good run on and I thought they were going to give it to me, and they didn't. Brad (Keselowski) spun me out. So yeah, it was one of them days.”

All’s well that ends well, though, and Bowyer ended up being relatively pleased with his second runner-up finish of the season – even though he had hoped to end a 165-race winless streak that dates back to October of 2012. It’s the second-longest streak without a victory amongst active Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series drivers.

Bowyer currently is 11th in the points standings. But he knows with Harvick becoming the 11th different driver to win this season on Sunday, he can’t necessarily count on getting into NASCAR’s playoffs via the points route.

He very well may need to win a race to be one of the 16 drivers advancing to the playoffs where they’ll battle for a championship over the final 10 races of the season.

"Let's face it, yeah, we've got to win,” Bowyer said. “We need a win in a big way, and (Sunday) would have been a great win. But after everything that happened, to get second place is, I guess, really good, as a matter of fact.”