NEW YORK – Rolling up Sixth Avenue, just a block south of Radio City Music Hall, Clint Bowyer is scrunched down in the backseat of a black Lincoln Navigator, wrenching his neck upward to see as much of the passing skyscrapers as possible.

"How far is Times Square?" he asks the Pakistani man who's been hired to chauffer Bowyer, who's in town for his first Chase for the Nextel Cup media day.

"Two blocks," the car's driver replies.

"Can you take me there?" Bowyer asks.

As the driver waits to turn left, an antsy taxicab driver honks his horn from behind.

Bowyer, who grew up slowly in Emporia, Kan., population 26,760, doesn't understand this sort of impatience.

"If I had a cup of coffee," he says, "I'd throw it on his windshield."

If you hadn't already guessed, New York City is new to Bowyer, which right away tells us that he's never before sat at NASCAR's big table. This is, after all, where NASCAR fetes its best drivers with a gala at the Waldorf-Astoria each December.

But even though