Just imagine being a driver for Hendrick Motorsports, the winningest team in NASCAR history, and one day suddenly finding yourself “locked out” of the house before the race! Well, that’s a nightmare for any driver. So imagine the shock when Alex Bowman, during a mid-week pandemic race at Texas Motor Speedway in 2020, found himself in exactly that position. He still managed to get to the race, but the story of how he did it would make you go, “Did Bowman really do that?”
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So, Bowman had just stepped out to eat, but when he returned to the tunnel entrance, he realized he’d committed the ultimate track-day sin: he had left his NASCAR hard card (his official security credential) sitting on the kitchen counter of his motorhome. Now, for most people, this might seem like a minor issue, and who doesn’t know Bowman, right? But the driver just gave everyone the reality of what it is like to deal with the staff in the front gate. Plus, also what he did to escape the consequences!
“Let me tell you, lady at the front gate of Texas, it does not matter who you are; Jeff Gordon is not going through that tunnel without their hard card,” Bowman shared. He knew he wouldn’t win the argument or reason with her. So he did what he thought was right; he improvised. Well, he outran the problem, quite literally!
“I drove really fast and held up a credit card. I knew if I stopped, I was in trouble. She does her job very well, and yeah, I knew anywhere else I felt like I would have been okay, but not there,” Bowman added.
Ever hear the story about the time @Alex_Bowman had to sneak back into @TXMotorSpeedway? 🥷 He left the track and forgot his hard card in his bus 😬 "I knew if I stopped at the gate, I was going to be in trouble." 🛑 What happens next is hilarious:
Interestingly, this wasn’t the only time Alex Bowman found himself in a funny situation. In 2020, he got stranded outside Texas Motor Speedway, and in 2024, he got stranded in the middle of a lake on a boat.
Talking to Jeff Gluck, Bowman revealed he went to a ‘really remote lake’ in South Carolina, which didn’t have any other boats. To add to the experience, there was no phone signal as well. And then a storm hit, and Bowman and Co. took shelter, waiting for it to pass. When the storm passed, they decided to start up the boat and go back. The only problem was that the boat wouldn’t fire back up.
“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,” he recalled.
Despite that, Bowman didn’t choose to simply sit back.
“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,” he described.
To make the experience even more hilarious, Bowman revealed he sold the boat on his way home simply because he didn’t want to be stranded on a lake again.
And the humor was a welcome change for Bowman and the No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports team, who had been enduring a rough stretch to start the 2026 Cup Series season, with nearly everything going wrong across the first nine races.
Alex Bowman steps out of his slump at Talladega
Finally, things seem to have begun to come together for Bowman after the Jack Link’s 500 race on Sunday at the Talladega Superspeedway. The Hendrick Motorsports driver earned three stage points in Stage 2 and then kept a good position throughout the remainder of the race. He found himself drafting close behind Carson Hocevar and racing on the inside line of the 2.66-mile track.
In the end, the No. 48 team assisted Hocevar to get the necessary push and take the victory for the Spire Motorsports team (their first-ever Cup Series victory). And Bowman finished the race in third position, recording his first top-five result since Richmond last August, a span of 16 races.
“To be blunt, it just feels good to get out here without crashing,” Bowman told Fox Sports after the event. “I’m getting old, [and] don’t have much of that left in me. Glad to get out of here clean.
“We had a great Ally 48 Chevy all day. Felt like we played the race the best we could kind of with the situations we were given.”
This comes after Alex Bowman suffered a vertigo bout that lingered for over a month, forcing the eight-time Cup winner out of four races. It began on March 1 at Circuit of the Americas, when Myatt Snider replaced Bowman in the No. 48 for the final 20 laps as his symptoms set in.
With Bowman behind the wheel, the numbers reflected a rough reality. Heading into Talladega, he had just 42 points across five starts (last among full-time drivers). A strong outing at Talladega, though, nearly doubled that total, adding 37 points, though he still sits 36th in the standings.
