Saturday, December 09, 2017

2018 Fantasy Nascar Profile: Clint Bowyer

Welcome to TimersSports

Driver Name: Clint Bowyer

Car #: 14

Make: Ford

Season Debut: 2006 (First-Full Season)

Number of Championships: 0

# of Career Starts: 433

# of Career Poles: 2

# of Career Wins: 8

# of Career Top 5s: 64 

# of Career Top 10s: 180

# of Career DNFs: 34

# of Career laps led: 2,360

Career Average Finish: 15.9  

Career Average Start: 17.8

# of 2017 Wins: 0

# of 2017 Top 5s: 6

# of 2017 Top 10s: 13

# of 2017 Poles: 0

# of 2017 DNFs: 4 

# of 2017 laps led: 22

2017 Average Finish: 15.5

2017 Average Start: 13.2

2017 Fantasy Recap - Bowyer returned to a big-time team in 2017 and it didn't exactly go as Bowyer so much expected. He didn't return to victory lane or really contend for top 5 finishes often. As he only produced 6 Top 5 finishes on the season. And 5 of those 6 top 5 finishes were on a short tracks, road courses and a plate track. Notice something? None of those tracks are the bread and butter of the intermediate tracks. That's not surprising. Excluding his top 5 finish at Cali (2.0 mile intermediate track), he didn't have any finishes better than 9th. Unless you want to add Dover to that list. Then you there's two. But still, most of his best runs were on the flats, short tracks, road courses and plate tracks. 9 top 10 finishes between Martinsville, Watkins Glenn, Sonoma, Daytona, Bristol, Pocono and New Hampshire. You get where Bowyer was good and where he had some issues. Also, I would like to point out that Bowyer ended the season good. He had 3 Top 13 finishes in the last four races in the 2017 season.

Strong Tracks - Sonoma, Watkins Glen, Bristol, Dover, Richmond and Martinsville

Weak Tracks - Michigan and Darlington 

Yahoo Grouping Tier Prediction: B-list Grouping

2018 Fantasy Outlook - I think Bowyer can (and will) improve on his first year with SHR. I felt like last year, he started out really consistent through the month of May. He only had one finish outside of the top 15. Then we enter June and he really started to fall off the map there. Dover and beyond where the wheels went off the track for him, in my opinion. He showed a lot of inconsistency after that point. But one thing remained consistent throughout 2017 and that was lackluster performances and results on the intermediate tracks in general. Statistically, Bowyer have never ran well on the intermediate in his career. When looking at his career average finishes, his 8 of 9 worst tracks are intermediate tracks. While places like Dover, Sonoma, Watkins Glen, Richmond, Martinsville, New Hampshire, Bristol, etc are at the top. What happen last season? All of those tracks I mentioned, he scored at least one top 10 finish. History says he will be good at these tracks once again and career trends like the ones we are seeing don't break overnight. If you are good at certain tracks for a decade or so, usually you don't lose a step from one year to another. Unless, something changes about you or the track.

*All stats are from DriverAverages.com

Twitter - @JeffNathans18