Early spin slows Clint Bowyer’s milestone Sprint Cup start

Forty-seven laps into Clint Bowyer’s 300th career Sprint Cup start, his 5-Hour Energy Toyota assumed a mind of its own.

Coming out of the second turn, Bowyer got loose. And as Fox broadcaster and former driver Darrell Waltrip said, Bowyer started “swaggin’ back and forth.”

As Bowyer spun, the traffic wonderfully maneuvered to avoid contact, and there was no harm, no foul. Bowyer was back, but with less than a quarter of the 5-Hour Energy 400 at Kansas Speedway completed, Bowyer had been shuffled back even farther than his 12th-row starting point.

It didn’t get much better after that. Bowyer finished where he started — 23rd. He spent much of the race a lap down from the leaders.

“Well that was disappointing and certainly not how we wanted to finish at my home track,” said Bowyer, who is from Emporia, Kan. “We just couldn’t seem to get the handling right … Just a disappointing end to a great week.”

Coming off a season-best third-place finish at Talladega last weekend, Bowyer announced that he and his wife, Lorra, who were married two weeks earlier in the Bahamas, were expecting a baby in September.

Bowyer said he wants to be present for the birth of the child, even if that means missing part of a week or a race.

“I’ve watched all my peers go through this, and to be honest with you, it always seem to go smooth sailing,” Bowyer said earlier this week. “We’ll just have to figure it out when we get there.”

That same day, Michael Waltrip Racing announced it had signed Bowyer to a three-year contract extension. Bowyer was in the final year of his deal.

“It creates great stability and excitement about what the next few years can bring,” said Bowyer, who will turn 35 on May 30.

He had hoped to celebrate with a strong finish at Kansas, where his mother, Jana, dropped the green flag on Saturday.

Bowyer was looking for his first Kansas victory. He has eight career Sprint Cup triumphs, but none in his last 52 starts.

It has been a mixed-results season. At Daytona, Bowyer flipped during a multi-car wreck at end of the 150-mile qualifying race and went on to finish 42nd when his engine failed.

He turned in top-10 finishes on successive weeks at Martinsville and Texas.

He entered Saturday 18th in the points standings, and believed he had momentum returning to his home track. But the early spin took that in a different direction.

This story was originally published May 10, 2014 at 11:24 PM with the headline "Early spin slows Clint Bowyer’s milestone Sprint Cup start."