Relief Washes Over Clint Bowyer's Team After Top-10 Run In Atlanta

Shane Wilson stood in the emptying Atlanta garage area with a red plastic cup in hand, his smile the only brightness in the dim light.

Wilson, Clint Bowyer's crew chief, oozed relief after his No. 33 team finished seventh in the penultimate regular season race, which helped solidify Bowyer's 12th-place position in the Chase standings.

Bowyer now leads 13th-place Ryan Newman by 117 points, which means he'll easily make the Chase with a top-25 run at Richmond next week.

"We definitely struggled today, so to get out of here with a seventh-place finish, we're really pleased with that," Wilson said. "And probably a little bit lucky."

At one point in the race, Bowyer had fallen to 18th place – behind several of the drivers who were in pursuit of his Chase spot – and was struggling with an ill-handling car (to put it nicely).

During the worst of his problems, Bowyer radioed to tell his team "I can't drive this, man! Got to fix this thing!"

"I know I'm sounding like a bitch," he said during the next caution, "but I'm just trying to stress the magnitude of things. It's bad."

Wilson had Bowyer spend extra time on pit road so the team could fix a problem near the quarterpanel, then kept making the adjustments that allowed Bowyer to escape with a vital top-10.

"That is absolutely what we needed," Bowyer said. "...Not what we wanted, but darn sure what we needed."

Bowyer's team is on the bubble in the first place because the racing luck it found in Atlanta hadn't been with the team for much of the summer.

Wilson noted there we plenty of occasions in which Bowyer ran in the top 10 all day, only to finish 20th.

"We've earned that (good) luck, you know what I mean?" Wilson said. "We gave up a lot of points in the summer. ... So this is actually a nice day where we ran 18th and finished top-10."

Chasing Bowyer next week will be Newman, Jamie McMurray and Mark Martin, although their chances are all very slim.

Martin remained mathematically alive for a Chase spot, but his team isn't even worrying about it.

"I'm not really concerned about the Chase," Martin's crew chief Alan Gustafson said. "We've got to run better than 21st, regardless."

Martin fell 15th in points (147 behind Bowyer), while 14th-place McMurray is 128 behind.

CHASE POINTS PICTURE

11) Greg Biffle (+161 inside Chase)

12) Clint Bowyer (+117 inside Chase)

13) Ryan Newman (-117 from Chase)

14) Jamie McMurray (-128 from Chase)

15) Mark Martin (-147 from Chase)