Jul
The NASCAR Cup Series season has been up-and-down, with excellent weeks followed by dismal weeks, and Christopher Bell is the most recent winner.
In order to be successful at Sunday’s race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, Bell, who placed 20th or worse in six of the first 10 races of the season, overtook Chase Elliott, who is currently the most popular racer in the series.
Bell’s win marked his first of the year and made him the third (of four) Joe Gibbs Racing racers to take home a triumph.
Bell’s season has mirrored JGR’s overall performance this year: it has been hot one race and cool the next. The organization’s cars are fast, but at times it has been challenging to get the pace, car setups, and pit road performance to work together in a race.
“It’s been stressful. After the first couple races of the year, I kind of wrote off pointing our way into the championship,” Bell said. “Then we had a stretch of really good races and kind of turned that around to like ‘Hey, we may be able to do this,’ and then you’ve got guys that kept winning, and the (playoff) cutoff line kept creeping up and up and up.
“So, it feels really good to hopefully get myself above that cutoff line by a couple spots.”
There are still 6 races left in the regular season, and Bell, 27, is the 14th different victor this year.
With 16 racers qualifying for the playoffs, the likelihood that all 16 spaces will be filled by winners and that no other racer will qualify solely on the basis of points increases week by week.
Even with a triumph in hand, the No. 20 squad still has work to do, according to Bell’s crew chief Adam Stevens.
“We clearly need bonus points. I think we’ve shown all year that we have probably top-five speed week-in and week-out, we just dug such a deep hole at the beginning of the season,” he said. “At one point four, five, six races in, we were like 32nd in the points.
“I think we’re somewhere around eighth right now, far enough away from the back end of the playoff qualified cars now that we don’t have to sweat that for these next few weeks. It was getting to the point with Daytona and Indy Road Course still on the schedule it was pretty clear that it was going to take a win to get in.”
At New Hampshire, Bell and his JGR racer Martin Truex Jr. both performed admirably, with Truex taking the lead on 172 of the 301 laps. The No. 19 squad’s choice to take two tyres during its last pit stop left Truex’s car handling poorly on the penultimate lap.
Bell was left to compete against Elliott, who had won two of the previous three races, for the victory despite not having led a lap in any of the six races prior to Sunday.
The Next Gen vehicle has made races this season more unexpected than usual.
“I mean, I think it’s just what organization hits it that weekend. There’s obviously a lot more Chevy and Ford teams than there are Toyota teams, so there’s a lot more opportunity for them to dominate the race than it is for us,” Bell said.
“At Atlanta – well, it’s a speedway race so I’m not going to count that. Before that, we had Road America; the JGR Toyotas have really struggled at road courses this year. Then if you look back at Nashville we were one of the best groups, probably the best group.
“It just comes in waves, and there are race tracks we’re good at and race tracks we’re not good at yet.”
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Christopher Bell, Grand Prix, New Hampshire Motor Speedway, IndyCar, NAPA, Nascar, NASCAR Cup Series, XFinity, JGR
