Notebook: Bowyer, No. 33 team work hard to fix Kentucky issues

Notebook: Bowyer, No. 33 team work hard to fix Kentucky issues

By Reid Spencer
Sporting News NASCAR Wire Service

(July 16, 2011)

WELCOME, N.C.—Clint Bowyer had a lot more on his mind this week than the traffic that stymied access to Kentucky Speedway.

Bowyer's No. 33 Chevrolet was out-of-control loose in race traffic during the inaugural Sprint Cup event at the 1.5-mile track. After backing into the Turn 2 wall to bring out the last caution of the race, Bowyer had to settle for a 35th-place finish and a drop to 12th in the series standings.

That performance followed a July 2 wreck at Daytona that led to a 36th-place result. A Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup spot that recently seemed a lock for the Emporia , Kan. , native now is in jeopardy.

Rather than spend the week at his retreat in the Ozarks, Bowyer put in time at the Richard Childress Racing shop, trying to help diagnose and fix the problem that plagued him at Kentucky .

"You have to be good every week," Bowyer said Wednesday at a media day for Bristol Motor Speedway at the RCR headquarters. "You can have a bad track or a bad weekend. We had one last weekend, and we spent a lot of time in the shop this week to make sure that we found the problem and that we're not going to bring that problem back to the racetrack.

"You have to be able to nip it in the bud immediately, get the problem fixed, because it can spiral out of control so easily. But we're plenty capable of getting back on a roll. We had six good runs in a row right there a couple months ago, and that's what we've got to get back to."

Accordingly, Bowyer welcomes the opportunity to race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway in Sunday's Lenox Industrial Tools 301. Bowyer is the most recent winner at the 1.058-mile track. Two of his four Cup victories have come there.

Junior still confident despite four-race slide

Despite a recent drop in the Sprint Cup standings, Dale Earnhardt Jr. doesn't sound like a worried man.

With an average finish of 27.75 in the last four races—including a 41st-place result at Infineon—Earnhardt has fallen from third in the standings and 10 points out of the series lead to eighth and 76 points behind leader Kyle Busch.

Has his confidence been shaken? Earnhardt says no.

"No, not really," he said Friday at New Hampshire . "It's just been really frustrating. Running poorly is not what you want to be doing. You just have to keep going to the racetrack.

"We've got good cars. We've got a really good team. We should be running better than we have been the last couple of weeks, and we know it. We're just going to try and work really hard to get back where we were earlier in the season.

"It shouldn't be that difficult."

Michael Waltrip sues F1 team

Michael Waltrip has filed suit against Williams Grand Prix Engineering Ltd. and Mike Coughlan, hired as Michael Waltrip Racing's director of vehicle design in Oct. 2010, according to court documents.

The pleading, filed Friday in U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina/Charlotte Division, alleges that Coughlan breached his employment agreement and that Williams, a Formula One team based in Great Britain, tortiously interfered with the agreement by negotiating to hire Coughlan while he was still under contract to MWR.