Alex Bowman will return to Hendrick Motorsports’ No. 48 car for one more NASCAR Cup Series season before retiring from full-time driving after 2027, he and the race team announced Thursday.Bowman’s decision to race one more year and then step away from NASCAR stemmed from a trio of reasons that all found themselves intertwined, the 33-year-old told The Athletic in an exclusive interview.First, Bowman emphasized, he never intended to have a full-time racing career that lasted into his 40s. When Bowman first signed with Hendrick in 2017, he recalls having a conversation with a financial advisor who asked him: “How long are you going to race for?”“The first thing I said was ‘I’m not doing this past 35,'” Bowman said. “I have a lot of things I want to do in my life that I can’t do while I’m driving.”Bowman announces retirement from NASCAR after one more seasonJeff GluckSecond, Bowman’s body has suffered a high degree of attrition throughout his racing career, and he’s conscious of the toll those injuries have taken. He missed five races with a concussion in 2022 and was out for three races in 2023 after breaking his back in a sprint car crash, and the 2023 back injury continues to bother him today.“My back hurts a lot; I’m in a lot of pain,” he said. “I’m doing (physical therapy) every single day, just trying to get through the season.”As a 16-year-old, Bowman also wrecked a midget car at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway dirt track and spent seven days in the ICU with two broken collarbones, broken ribs and punctured lungs.But perhaps his scariest injury came earlier this year. While racing at Austin’s Circuit of the Americas road course, Bowman was stricken with vertigo and became seriously ill inside the car before eventually getting out.He then missed four races while recovering and seriously considered retiring at the end of this year.“In March, (retiring after this season is) what I was doing,” Bowman said. “I was pretty adamant that I wasn’t going to come back and that I was done. We had all those conversations.”Ultimately, he decided to return for one more season after finding flashes of success upon getting back into the seat, wanting to end his career on a better note than this year (his 21.8 average finish is his worst since joining Hendrick). He also had an understanding that a premature departure would leave the team in a bind before a suitable replacement for the No. 48 car was available. Hendrick has no obvious immediate replacement available, and next year’s crop of free agent drivers would be more enticing for Hendrick to potentially lure a star worthy of one of NASCAR’s most-coveted seats.“That just gave me more motivation to want to go out on a better year and want to put the effort in to make that happen, and it lined up with what the team needed a lot better as well,” he said of returning for 2027.But even if he was in perfect health, Bowman said this is still roughly the timeline in which he envisioned the end of his full-time career. That’s because his third reason for retirement was perhaps the most important: Bowman desires a more normal life, is excited to be a father (he got engaged to fiancée Chloe Henderson in December) and has long felt the glare of the spotlight in an intense — and at times detrimental — manner for his mental health.“For me, it’s just a life timing thing and what I’m willing to do and put myself through to try to compete at this level,” he said. “It’s really hard for me. It is everything I have every single day. All I do is train and sim and meetings and all this stuff to try to be competitive.“Some people can balance it a lot better and have more success. Maybe I’m not good enough to do that, and I have to work super hard to try and have some of the success.”With fatherhood in mind, Bowman said he doesn’t want to be in a situation where he’s bringing negativity home from the racetrack on a weekly basis. He’s deeply affected by poor results — like this week, after making a mistake and causing a crash at North Wilkesboro — and he can’t stand the thought of racing impacting his home life with a young child around.“It just spills over into everything else,” he said. “… I don’t want to be a dad when I’m coming home mad from races and carrying over into that. That’s probably top of the list, is how I carry the week.”“I would love next year to be the best I’ve ever been in my entire career and win a bunch of races and contend for a championship,” Alex Bowman says of his hopes for his final season. (David Jensen / Getty Images)Bowman began his Cup Series career as a backmarker driver for BK Racing and later Tommy Baldwin Racing. He famously learned he’d been fired from the latter team from social media while in a Taco Bell drive-thru line, then rebuilt his career by taking a chance on himself as Hendrick’s simulator driver.He filled in for Dale Earnhardt Jr. for 10 races after Earnhardt suffered a concussion in 2016, then sat out in 2017 while he waited for a big break. That came when he was named as Earnhardt’s replacement in the No. 88 car, and Bowman went on to win eight Cup Series races, make the playoffs seven times and become Hendrick’s sixth-longest-tenured driver.“Alex has meant so much to our organization for a long time,” team owner Rick Hendrick said in a statement. “He’s overcome adversity, won big races and represented our team and partners with professionalism, personality and class.“Alex is a tremendous talent in the race car and an even better person outside of it. We’re proud he’ll have the opportunity to finish his full-time career with us on his terms. He’s family.”But Bowman is still only 33, around the same age as in-their-prime drivers like Kyle Larson, Bubba Wallace and Daniel Suárez. What if he has a great season next year and feels he’s leaving some good years of his career on the table?That’s what he would actually prefer, he said.“I would love to go out like that,” he said. “I would love next year to be the best I’ve ever been in my entire career and win a bunch of races and contend for a championship, try to win a championship and then be able to walk away. I would absolutely love that.”But if it were up to him, he would opt not to make a retirement announcement at all. He doesn’t like attention and would prefer to “dip out and disappear” after his final race rather than having a year and a half of buildup.In the interest of the team’s future plans though, he said, “that’s not how things work.”Bowman said he envisions his post-NASCAR career including fatherhood, driving his drift car (he has a passion for all things car-related) and returning to sprint cars again on a limited basis (“but Chloe might literally kill me in my sleep over that one,” he added).There’s also a plan for Bowman to stay involved with Hendrick through the Hendrick Performance side of the company, which sells rare and exotic vehicles.“Just having the freedom to do more and experience way different aspects of life — the last 25 years, it’s been all day, every day (about racing),” he said. “Moving on from that is definitely going to be different.”