KANSAS CITY, Kan. -- Coming to Kansas has always meant coming home for Clint Bowyer, and this week is no exception. He stopped at a friend's house to work on a dirt car, took the members of his dirt-racing team out to the Harrah's casino on the Missouri River, held his annual fan club gathering Thursday night at a local go-kart track. He's covered the eastern end of the state from Topeka to Lawrence to Kansas City, and Friday night he was heading back to Lakeside Speedway, the dirt track where he got his start.

“

We'll get through it. We've got to get through it this weekend. I'm here to win this race. I've gotten close a couple times, and I can promise you, if we win this thing it will be a big party.

”

-- CLINT BOWYER

For the driver of the No. 33 car, it's all been a welcome distraction -- especially now, as Bowyer deals with the weight of a penalty that's effectively ended his championship hopes. Wednesday, a three-person committee denied Richard Childress Racing's appeal of a 150-point deduction stemming from violations found on Bowyer's winning car from New Hampshire Motor Speedway two weeks ago. There's still one last-ditch appeal to be made, to chief appellate officer John Middlebrook, a former General Motors executive. But given that only one of 12 appeals to reach the final level has been overturned, Bowyer isn't holding out much hope..

"I've told Richard, it's not worth fighting," Bowyer said Friday at Kansas. "In my opinion, their [NASCAR's] minds are made up. It is what it is, and if you want to be a part of this great thing we call a sport, you better just go on and enjoy what it is. He's fighting hard, and I'm proud of the case that they put together. I think they worked very hard on it, they put a lot of time and energy and money into presenting a case that could prove less than a 16th of an inch how that car could be out. At the end of the day, if you're going to pick that, it is what it is."

What it is is desperate -- assuming the final appeal is denied, Bowyer is 235 points out with eight races remaining, a deficit that appears to be insurmountable. He's not holding out any hopes of a miracle. His goal now is help teammates Kevin Harvick and Jeff Burton in their quest to bring RCR its first championship on NASCAR's premier division since Dale Earnhardt's last in 1994.

"I think the championship hopes are done for myself," Bowyer said. "The thing that I have to do is be the best teammate I can be. We have to bring a championship home. We still have two shots at that. But for myself and our race team, I've never finished out of the top-five in the Chase, and I want to continue that streak and want to continue that consistency in the Chase, and I think that's an attainable goal. The biggest thing is to be the best teammate I can be."

Harvick, 65 points behind leader Denny Hamlin, will welcome the help.

"It's going to allow him to get out of the box, to allow things that maybe we don't want to try because we have to be a little more conservative on the performance side of it," Harvick said, "whether it be an engine the engine shop wants to put in, or parts and pieces that maybe the engineering department finds and thinks are better but aren't proven on the race track. All those things can go into his car, and he can worry about winning races and really being aggressive. They haven't gotten to do that in a while."

Coming home, though, seems to have been the best medicine. Putting engines in dirt cars, gambling with his old buddies, and racing go-karts against the members of his fan club -- a few of whom, he admits, beat him -- has helped do what time on its own couldn't, and allow Bowyer to finally put the penalty into his rearview mirror. There's no question it was still eating at him last week at Dover, when an understandably distracted driver recorded a 25th-place finish that only deepened his hole.

"I made some mistakes on the track last week that were uncharacteristic of myself," said Bowyer, who will have crew chief Shane Wilson -- facing a six-week suspension -- with him until the final appeal is heard. "We made some mistakes as a team that were uncharacteristic, and our heads weren't 100 percent in the game. I don't want this mess to bother us anymore. I'm at my home track, I'm having fun and that's what I aim to do."

Burton has urged his younger teammate to let it go. He remembers a time during his rookie season when he was thrown out of a race at Richmond, something that at the time seemed devastating. Now, that episode is a mere blip on his personal radar screen. Bowyer, Burton said, will one day come to view his current situation in the same way.

"The thing I tried to impress on Clint is, we live in a moment, and we think that in that moment, everything revolves around that," said Burton, 80 points off the lead. "In two weeks, there's going to be another conversation about some other controversy. ... It's a big, big, big distraction, there's no way around it. In some ways, having the appeal process over, even though it wasn't the result they were looking for, in some ways you're able to move on. Right now it's the center of the world. That's what everybody's talking about. But it's going to move. It's going to be OK."

Friday, it was easy to think that everything was OK already. Bowyer's No. 33 car shot to near the top of the speed chart during the day's first practice session, and he was already looking forward to headlining two nights of late model and dirt modified action at Lakeside, the half-mile oval where he once competed on a weekly basis. And then there's Sunday's Cup Series event, on a track where Bowyer was runner-up in 2007, and where the native of Emporia, Kan., wants to win more than almost any other place. He breaks through Sunday, and the penalty might feel like a distant memory.

"We'll get through it," Bowyer said. "We've got to get through it this weekend. I'm here to win this race. I've gotten close a couple times, and I can promise you, if we win this thing it will be a big party."

Related:
• Sound Off: Clint Bowyer
• RCR loses appeal to overturn Bowyer penalty