Around the Track: Texas

Nextel Cup rookie Clint Bowyer fell two spots to 16th in points after leaving Martinsville Speedway with a 22nd-place finish.

Now he heads to Texas Motor Speedway, where he finished sixth and seventh in the two Busch Series races a year ago.

Everything's bigger in Texas, they say.

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I can't wait to get there and get away from the short tracks we've run the past two weeks. A 29th-place finish at Bristol and 22nd last week at Martinsville wasn't exactly what we had planned.

But last week could have been worse. We just had the bad luck to get involved in that wreck on the third lap. We went a lap down there, but the biggest thing was the hood clips broke off on a run and we had to pit under green and went three laps down.

I learned a lot, though. The biggest thing is how long these races are. We did exactly what we tried not to do, which was stay out of trouble the first half of the race.

Unfortunately, they wrecked in front of us and there wasn't anywhere to go. That's the way short track racing is.

I know I'll be more ready for what's to come when we go back. As much as you tell yourself it's a 500-lap race, it's still hard not to try to go forward. It bit me a couple of times already. I've got to be smarter about that.

The most fun about last weekend was getting to run in my first Truck race. It looked like we were going to be the truck to beat there for a while. Our pit strategy hurt us a little bit. We tried to stay out a little longer and ended up getting in trouble coming up through the field and got spun out.

But it was a good opportunity and I had a blast racing it. I'm looking forward to my next opportunity to do that.

We shouldn't have those types of problems at Texas. I've run well there. It's a fast, wide-open track and our package will be really good there.

It's momentum track. You get into Turn 1 extremely hard. Turns 1 and 2 are banked a little bit more than 3 and 4, so you go into 1 and 2 with a lot of speed and momentum.

Then your speed kind of flattens off coming out of the turns. You've got to be careful not to get into the gas too quickly because you can get into the wall pretty easily.

Turns 3 and 4, you've just got to get in there pretty good and get back to the gas as fast as you can. That's the biggest thing, not getting in too deep and getting back to the hammer pretty fast.

	Clint Bowyer 2006 Nextel Cup stats Track St. Fin. Laps Status Daytona 37 6 203 running Fontana 32 14 251 running Las Vegas 20 15 270 running Atlanta 16 27 324 running Bristol 27 29 495 running Martinsville 42 22 496 running

It'll take a few laps to get adjusted to the big track again. But we're bringing in the best aero package we've got right now. There's a lot of confidence in our program for intermediate tracks.

Off the track, I've been at the shop a lot. After struggling like we have the past couple of weeks, it's easy for the guys to get down. I try to keep everybody geeked up as best as I can.

The Texas track is fairly close to my hometown of Emporia, Kan. I've got some family and friends coming down. They're all people that helped me get where I'm at. It's important for me that they still get to come and be a part of what I'm doing these days.

I grew up racing motorcycles in Texas. We'd go down there every weekend. It's probably a seven-hour drive. Back in the motorcycle days when you didn't have planes like you do now, it didn't seem like such a big deal.

Emporia isn't a very big city. It's a college town with about 30,000 people. It's a lot like coming from Martinsville or Bristol when you go from there to the Fort Worth-Dallas area.

I like going to the big cities. You usually don't have a chance to leave the track much, but when you have a chance to it's neat to go to the city and check out the different things there are to do.

In Dallas I like to go down to the Stockyard and get a bite to eat. I've got a pair of cowboy boots. They're in my motorhome, so I'll probably bring those babies out.

But the game plan is to rally this team and get back inside the top 10 in the next few weeks.

In Jack Daniel's "Around the Track,'' Clint Bowyer addresses each week's venue as well as his philosophies on racing and life in general around NASCAR.