Alex Bowman has given the most detailed account yet of the vertigo that knocked him out of nearly a month of the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series season, describing an ordeal of spinning, nausea and uncertainty that began mid-race at Circuit of the Americas on March 1 and cost him four full race weekends in the No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet.
Speaking to Jeff Gluck of The Athletic this week, the 33-year-old reached for an analogy most adults will recognize. “Have you ever drank way too much and got the spins? That’s it,” Bowman said. “Except I couldn’t lay on the couch and hang my leg off the side of the couch to fix it. That’s honestly the easiest way to describe it.”
From Mid-Race Exit to a Month on the Sidelines
Bowman’s season unraveled in real time at COTA, where the symptoms hit hard enough that he climbed out of the car during the race and handed the No. 48 to substitute Myatt Snider mid-event. What followed was a four-race absence covering Phoenix, Las Vegas, Darlington and Martinsville, with relief drivers keeping the seat warm while Bowman worked through testing and treatment.
The driver was candid about how unpleasant the experience was at its worst. “I was obviously throwing up all over myself. I was dizzy. I was spinning. It wasn’t a lot of fun,” he said.
He also pushed back on an assumption that had taken hold among fans during his absence: that he spent those weeks at home in a constant state of dizziness. “There was a misconception from fans that when I was sitting at home the next couple weeks, I was sitting there with vertigo the whole time. Thankfully, I was not,” Bowman explained. “The race car was about the only thing that could make that happen, other than some tests that the doctors put me through. But yeah, it sucked a lot. Glad to be feeling better from that now, but it was not a lot of fun.”
That detail is the most revealing part of his account. The condition was triggered specifically by the violent inputs of a Cup car, which made the path back to racing more complicated than simply waiting for symptoms to fade at home. Doctors could provoke the sensation in testing, and the car could provoke it at speed, so medical clearance had to mean genuine confidence the spins would not return in traffic at 180 mph.
A Return That Started Rough and Then Surged
Bowman was cleared to return at Bristol, and his comeback lasted less than a third of the race before he was collected in a wreck through no fault of his own. The results that followed told a better story. Back-to-back third-place finishes at Talladega and Texas suggested the layoff had taken nothing off his speed, and for a stretch the No. 48 team looked like one of the better Hendrick cars on pure results.
The last month has been leaner. Bowman’s results have drifted backward since that Texas run, and he arrives at this weekend’s Great American Getaway 400 at Pocono Raceway needing to rebuild momentum as the regular season passes its halfway point. The playoff math is unforgiving for a driver who missed four races: while his waiver protects his eligibility, points accumulated by rivals during his absence cannot be recovered, and a win remains the cleanest route into the postseason field.
Hendrick’s History of Standing by the No. 48
The vertigo episode is the latest chapter in a run of physical setbacks that have tested Bowman’s durability and Hendrick Motorsports’ patience alike. He missed five races in 2022 with a concussion suffered at Texas Motor Speedway and sat out the 2025 Chicago street race weekend, among other interruptions across his career. Through all of it, the organization has consistently backed him, and team owner Rick Hendrick extended Bowman’s contract through 2026 before last season.
The pattern around driver health in NASCAR has shifted meaningfully over the past decade. Where drivers once hid symptoms to protect their seats, the sport’s concussion protocols and the precedent set by Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s openness about his own injuries have made stepping out of the car a defensible choice rather than a career death sentence. Bowman’s willingness to climb out mid-race at COTA, and to speak this plainly about vomiting and dizziness afterward, sits squarely in that newer tradition. It also echoes the current moment in the garage: Christopher Bell raced through a fractured wrist after being cleared at Pocono, a reminder that medical clearance decisions now sit at the center of championship narratives.
The Road That Brought Bowman to the No. 48
Bowman’s career has been defined by making the most of difficult openings. He arrived at Hendrick Motorsports as the substitute for Dale Earnhardt Jr. during Earnhardt’s 2016 concussion absence, performed well enough to inherit the No. 88 full time in 2018, and won the pole for the Daytona 500 in his first race with the team. When seven-time champion Jimmie Johnson retired, Bowman moved into the iconic No. 48 in 2021 and won four races that season, including Richmond and the Chicago street course years later, building a reputation as a driver who wins when the car gives him the chance.
That history is part of why Hendrick has shown such patience through the injuries. Bowman has repeatedly returned from layoffs at speed, including his comeback from the 2022 concussion and from a back injury suffered in a sprint car crash in 2023 that cost him races mid-season. The vertigo episode fits an unfortunate pattern, but so does the recovery: in every previous instance, Bowman has come back and run up front within weeks.
Vertigo itself is a more common and more varied condition than its reputation suggests. The sensation of the room spinning typically traces to the inner ear, where the vestibular system that governs balance can be disrupted by inflammation, displaced crystals in the ear canals, or pressure changes, and episodes can be triggered by specific head movements or sustained g-loading of the kind a stock car generates in the corners. That mechanical trigger matches Bowman’s description of a condition that stayed dormant on the couch but returned in the car, and it explains why his clearance process ran through specialists rather than a simple waiting period.
For Hendrick Motorsports, the episode also tested the organization’s substitute depth, with Snider among those stepping into a car that sat inside the top 20 in owner points throughout the absence. The team never publicly wavered on Bowman’s return, and crew chief decisions through the spring consistently treated the layoff as temporary.
What It Means for the Rest of 2026
Bowman’s situation heading into the summer is a strange mix of encouraging and precarious. The vertigo, by his own account, is behind him, and the Talladega and Texas podiums proved the speed survived the layoff. But the No. 48 team has 12 races to either win or claw into playoff position on points, and Pocono has historically been a solid track for Hendrick Motorsports, which returns to the Tricky Triangle for its lone visit of the season.
The 2.5-mile triangle rewards drivers who can manage three corners that share nothing in common, and this year adds a variable for everyone: Goodyear is debuting a new right-side tire for the weekend, a development we broke down in detail in our look at the new Pocono tire package. An equalizer like fresh rubber can shuffle the field, and a shuffled field tends to favor drivers with nothing to lose.
Bowman has spent 2026 proving he can come back from the kind of episode that ends some careers quietly. The next 12 weekends will determine whether the comeback becomes a playoff story or a cautionary one. Either way, the driver of the No. 48 has made one thing clear: the worst of the spins are behind him, and he intends to be judged on speed from here.
