Year in review: Clint Bowyer's strange, unexpected 2015
As years go, they don't get any stranger than the one Clint Bowyer had in 2015, when he entered the season with high hopes and left it with his career trajectory totally rearranged, thanks to the demise of Michael Waltrip Racing.
Bowyer began his fourth year with MWR in strong fashion, finishing seventh in the season-opening Daytona 500 in his No. 15 Toyota. By May, Bowyer had signed a three-year contract extension with the team and the future appeared bright. After all, in his first year with the team in 2012, Bowyer nearly won the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championship, finishing second to Brad Keselowski.
And, indeed, things were headed in the right direction by midseason, with Bowyer posting four top-10 finishes in a five-race stretch from Dover in late spring to the Fourth of July weekend race at Daytona.
During the summer, Bowyer stayed high enough in the points to qualify for the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup, which was a big positive for both the driver and the team.
But in late July, MWR co-owner Rob Kauffman dropped a bombshell: He would leave the team at the end of the year to become a minority partner in Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates in 2016.
And since Kauffman was the money man who bailed out MWR originally, when he left, it meant the team would close at the end of the season, putting Bowyer and teammate David Ragan out of work, along with about 220 team employees.
"Had a great four years at this company, a great culture, great personnel, great people at MWR and I really did enjoy the years that I spent there," Bowyer said prior to the Bristol night race in August. "That being said, Rob (Kauffman) provided us all of that and invested a lot into this sport. ... It's a business decision to move forward on his end and that's where our futures for he and I unfortunately just don't align anymore."
The good news for Bowyer was two-fold: First, he qualified for the Chase. And second, he had no trouble finding a new ride -- two of them, in fact. He'll drive for HScott Motorsports next year before replacing Tony Stewart at Stewart-Haas Racing in 2017 and beyond.
The bad news was that with MWR shutting down at the end of the year, Bowyer had almost no chance of making a serious title run, despite making the Chase. Once the decision had been made to close the doors, the team started scaling back.
As a result, Bowyer was knocked out in the first round of the Chase and ended up 16th in points. Not what he wanted, certainly, but probably the most that could be realistically expected under the circumstances.
