The car was a castoff from NASCAR's top series, a former No. 36 Pontiac driven by Ken Schrader at MB2 Motorsports, and it had seen better days. It had been wrecked and pieced back together again, reborn with all the sweat and sponsorship money a couple of old dirt racers could muster. Clint Bowyer strapped into it for the first time at an ARCA event at Nashville Superspeedway, with no idea that destiny had slipped along for the ride.

Eight hundred miles away, in a place far removed from that Nashville ARCA garage in more ways than one, Richard Childress was watching. Rain had washed out Cup activities that day on the road course in Watkins Glen, N.Y. Sitting in his motor home, the champion team owner flipped through satellite television channels and came across the ARCA race in Tennessee. Craig Abbott, a franchiser for the Sonic Drive-In chain that backed Bowyer's car and was an associate sponsor at Richard Childress Racing, had told his friend to watch this hard-charging kid from Kansas.

So Childress watched. And liked what he saw.

"I started watching him, reading about him winning races out West," Childress said. "[Abbott] told me [Bowyer] was going to run that ARCA race. I knew the car he had wasn't that good of a car, but he almost won the race with it."

Almost. Bowyer led 47 laps on that August afternoon in 2003, getting everything he could out of a banged-up racecar, and finishing second only after Mario Gosselin overtook him with less than 10 to go. And thus began the chain of events that led to a meeting in Charlotte, a test session in Florida, and ultimately a ride with one of NASCAR's premier organizations for a driver few had ever heard of until Childress introduced him to the world. Now it comes full circle, as the pride of Emporia, Kan., comes home to Kansas Speedway this weekend as a race winner on the sport's premier circuit and one of the top contenders in the Chase for the Nextel Cup.

It seems like a fairy tale come true. But those who knew Bowyer back when he was spinning dirt modifieds at Lakeside Speedway in Kansas City aren't surprised.

"I don't know many people that are more of a fierce competitor than Clint Bowyer," said Scott Traylor, who owned the ARCA car in which Bowyer recorded his eye-opening runner-up finish at Nashville. "I've been going to races since '66, and I know a lot of racers. And I know very few that have the swagger and the confidence and the ability, and just everything to back it up. He's just driven like nobody I've ever seen."

He's been doing it for some time, starting in motorcycles as a 5-year-old and winning a pair of NASCAR Weekly Racing Series track titles once he progressed from two wheels to four. Traylor, who had owned one of Bowyer's modified cars, damaged the old MB2 Pontiac while competing in an ARCA race at Kansas City in early 2003. He had sunk roughly $50,000 into the vehicle, and didn't have enough to cash to fix it on his own. Enter Bowyer, who scrounged up about $15,000 worth of sponsorship from Sonic, paired it with the $10,000 in sponsor money Traylor had, and helped to piece the car back together again. (Continued)