Jeff Gluck

USA TODAY Sports

Our series of weekly NASCAR driver interviews continues with Alex Bowman, who has driven seven races in two different No. 88 cars this season. Bowman has seven starts so far in place of Dale Earnhardt Jr. at Hendrick Motorsports, where he has a pair of top-10 finishes. And Bowman is 7-for-7 in top-10s in the Xfinity Series, where he's driven part time for JR Motorsports this season.

Q: What is an errand or chore in your daily life people might be surprised to learn you do yourself?

A: There’s a lot of giving baths to my puppy, Finn. I have a house on the lake, and you can’t keep him out of the lake. He runs down through the mud to get into the lake, and he’ll roll around in the mud and he comes back just covered in it. So it’s a lot of cleaning up his messes.

Q: If you could do any race over again, which race would you choose?

A: Right now I’d say Charlotte (last month, when Bowman hit the wall with a blown tire). We’d pit and put a left front (tire) on it. But we didn’t know we had a left front going down or anything.

Q: The longest race of the year is 600 miles. How long of a race could you physically handle without a driver change?

A: I could probably do 1,000 miles, because 600 never seems like it’s a very long race. But it depends on the racetrack. Like you couldn’t run 1,000 laps around Dover — it’s just not doable. Around Charlotte, though, you could do 1,000.

Q: Let’s say president of NASCAR was an elected position voted on by the drivers and you decided to run. What would one of your campaign promises be?

A: Shorter race weekends, like one-day and two-day shows. That would be pretty popular in the garage, because we keep hundreds of people away from their families every weekend, and it’s a long, grueling schedule. Some shorter weekend schedules would be good for the sport.

Q: At the start of this year, exactly 2,900 drivers had ever raced in the Sprint Cup Series. Where do you rank among those 2,900?

A: Until I started driving the 88, it was probably pretty close to the bottom. (Smiles) It’s hard to say. There are a lot of really talented drivers who have run Cup races but never had success or won. I’d like to sit here and say I’m the best out of all of them, but I think that’s just the mentality every driver has.

Q: What do you think your reputation is and is that reputation accurate?

A: I think it’s changed a lot in the last couple months. I was probably looked at as another lapped car for the past couple years. But we’ve run up front all year in the Xfinity car, and then getting in this Cup car, a lot of people who maybe didn’t think I was that great of a race car driver probably changed their minds a little bit.

Hopefully my reputation is somebody who has been underrated for a while and can get the job done depending on the circumstances.

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Q: A famous chef wants you to invest in the new restaurant he’s opening, but he wants you to pick the cuisine. What type of food would your restaurant serve?

A: I’m going with soul food. I feel like that would be good. Plus now that I can eat again (after a stomach virus last month), I’m like, “Man, I want some good food.” My eyes have been way bigger than my stomach here lately. I’ll get this big old plate of food and eat like half of it.

Q: What is the most daring thing you’ve done outside of racing?

A: I went cliff-jumping. We were camping at Lake Jocassee in South Carolina, and we had to climb up this big cliff to jump off into the lake. I don’t like heights, and we climbed up 70 feet to a ledge. It took a solid seven or 10 minutes to get myself to jump off the thing once I started looking down, but it was pretty cool.

Q: In a move to generate more excitement, NASCAR decides in an upcoming race they’re going to require every driver to have a passenger in the car. You get to pick the passenger. Who do you choose?

A: There’s a couple crew chiefs who need to ride with their drivers and realize sometimes the cars aren’t handling as well as maybe they think it is. But I might pick my dad (Sean). He’d be pretty funny. He won’t ride in a car with me to begin with, so I think getting in a race car with me would be hilarious.

Your driving makes him uncomfortable?

Yeah, he’s a little scared.

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Q: How often do you talk inside the car without hitting the radio button?

A: Pretty much never. I’m pretty quiet inside the car. And I’m not one of those guys who is going to blow up at the crew on the radio if the car is bad, either. That never seems (to) do anything good. I’ve been in some situations where the crew chief will blow up at you, and it just never helps. Everyone gets discouraged when that happens. So I try to be pretty quiet, give feedback when I can and just go from there.

Q: Who will win the Sprint Cup in 2021?

A: Hopefully me. I don’t really know what my future holds, but that would be awesome. If I had to pick somebody other than me, I think some of the young talent in the sport like Chase Elliott, William Byron and Erik Jones would be good.

Q: I’ve been asking each driver to give me a question for the next interview. The last driver was Michael McDowell, and he wanted to know: “How good does it feel to be Alex Bowman right now?”

A: A lot better than it’s felt the last couple years. It’s been a really humbling couple years. I went from winning a lot of races to riding around and finishing 30th a lot. It’s really hard in that situation to manage expectations and be OK going to the racetrack knowing that. So now having a shot to win every week is a lot of fun and people actually think I can drive all of the sudden. It’s funny — I must have just learned how to drive a race car. (Laughs)

And do you have a question for the next interview? It’s with Spencer Gallagher.

I know Spencer really well, so this is perfect. In 2012, he hired me to driver-coach him at a test. He used words like “persnickety” and “cascading” to describe the race car. I had to get a dictionary out for persnickety and asked him what Cascade dish soap had to do with the race car.

So I’d like to know: “What makes you describe the car with such a crazy vocabulary?”

Follow Gluck on Twitter @jeff_gluck