By Noah Poser, Staff Writer
Early in Sunday’s playoff race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Christopher Bell dropped outside the top 10, raising concern as fellow championship contenders surged ahead.
With pit stops looming, Bell advised crew chief Adam Stevens against making any major changes, confident the car would come to him as the race wore on.
Bell’s instincts proved to be right, as his No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota steadily gained pace throughout the evening, resulting in a third-place finish to go with the nine stage points he earned along the way.
This came, of course, after he narrowly escaped a multi-car crash that collected William Byron and Ty Dillon with 31 laps to go, avoiding what could have been a race-ending incident.
The result vaulted Bell to third in the playoff standings, 20 points above the cutline as the Cup Series heads to Talladega. The result goes down as his third consecutive third-place finish, two of those coming on intermediate tracks.
“The intermediate package served us well throughout the playoffs,” Bell said. “We got a lot of good results out of it. Our teammates were really fast, so I’m proud of that and now it’s on to Talladega. Hopefully we survive, and then we’ll see how we are with the short-track package.”
Survival appears to be a solid goal for Bell at Talladega, where his track record is spotty at best. The sixth-year driver has three top-10 finishes in 11 races at the superspeedway, although one of those came in this race last year.
Bell acknowledged the challenge ahead, but noted that while Talladega has been rough for him in the past, it presents the same challenges and level of unpredictability for everyone.
“Talladega is gonna be really tough,” Bell said. “We just gotta survive it. It’ll be the same for everybody, and it’s gonna be interesting.”
If Bell can escape Talladega with his points cushion intact, he’ll be in a strong position to reach the Championship 4 for the third time in his career.
And if he does advance, it could help, though not entirely erase, the sting of last fall’s Martinsville race, where Bell appeared to have clinched a Championship 4 berth before NASCAR penalized him for what it deemed an unsafe maneuver.
Bell had gotten into the wall in Turn 4 and rode it through the corner, a move officials ruled illegal following rulebook changes after Ross Chastain’s infamous “Hail Melon.”