WELCOME, N.C. -- For 20 minutes during a stop at the Richard Childress Racing shop on the Sprint Cup preseason media tour last month, the owner of RCR and his drivers sat on stage and answered all kinds of questions.

Richard Childress expounded on a variety of topics; Kevin Harvick mused about defending his Daytona 500 championship; and Jeff Burton weighed in on seemingly all the pertinent racing issues of the day.

Meanwhile, sitting to the far right of the stage was Clint Bowyer. He might have been merely a few feet removed from Burton, but might as well have been a hundred miles away. Somehow, during the entire question-and-answer session, Bowyer never was asked to open his mouth.

Yet this is the RCR driver who finished highest in the points standings a year ago. In fact, the only drivers to finish higher than him in 2007 were the two from Hendrick Motorsports who pretty much dueled with each other throughout the season -- eventual winner Jimmie Johnson and runner-up Jeff Gordon.

All three RCR drivers made the 12-man Chase for the championship. But while Bowyer eventually secured third place in the standings, the best Burton could manage was eighth and Harvick slipped to 10th.

As the 2008 season is set to open with next Sunday's 50th running of the Daytona 500, Bowyer is convinced he can do even better. In the meantime, he said that he is content to continue pretty much flying under the radar.

Asked how he could go 20 minutes without being asked a single question on the RCR stage, Bowyer shrugged and said simply: "I enjoy the racing part of it. You've got to be good at all aspects of this, I know. But it still comes down to four wheels and a steering wheel for me."

By now everyone knows the story of how Bowyer came to drive for Childress. While driving to a second-place finish in a 2003 ARCA race in Nashville, Bowyer caught the eye of Childress, who was watching on television. Shortly after the race, Childress tracked down Bowyer in a fabrication shop in Bowyer's hometown of Emporia, Kan.

Told that someone from RCR was on the phone and wanted to talk with him about perhaps driving for the team, Bowyer almost didn't take the call.

"I thought someone was pulling a practical joke on me," he said. (Continued)