Christopher Bell Comes Up Short Despite Dominant Performance At Las Vegas

Christopher Bell’s No. 20 Toyota was the class of the field during Sunday’s South Point 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, but a late-race caution and fuel strategy gamble by other drivers ultimately denied him the victory and a guaranteed spot in the Championship 4.

Bell led a race-high 155 laps and appeared to be on his way to a dominant win when his Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Ty Gibbs spun on the backstretch on Lap 192. The caution came just outside the fuel window for most teams to make it to the finish, presenting a challenging situation for Bell and his crew chief Adam Stevens.

“A win is a guarantee [of a berth into the Championship 4], and we had a win right at our fingertips,” Bell said.

Stevens informed Bell that he would likely be a handful of laps short of making it to the end of the race on fuel. The team’s strategy was to go as hard as possible at the beginning of the run before pitting and chasing down any stragglers that attempted to stretch their fuel.

Meanwhile, playoff drivers Joey Logano and Denny Hamlin opted to gamble on fuel strategy and stay out on track. Bell quickly charged through the field after exiting the pits nearly 30 seconds off the lead, but despite closing in on race leader Daniel Suarez, he ultimately fell short of catching Logano by nearly three-quarters of a second when the checkered flag flew.

“Disappointment,” Bell added when describing his race. “I lost an Xfinity race here; I think it was in 2019, in the exact same way where the yellow flag comes out on the outside of the window, leading the race, having to make a pit stop, and someone in the back stretches it. I’ve seen it before, and I couldn’t believe it.”

Stevens acknowledged that there was nothing the team could have done differently, stating, “There’s nothing we could have done differently as a team; we executed on all fronts. We brought arguably the best car, good pit strategy, great pit stops and that caution fell at exactly the wrong time. Two laps earlier or two laps later, it doesn’t pan out that way. It happened right where it screwed the leaders. You can’t be upset about that, you can’t control that.”

Despite the disappointing result, Bell scored 19 stage points and tallied 54 points on Sunday, giving him a 42-point buffer over the elimination line with two races remaining in the Round of 8. He is also the defending winner at the next track on the schedule, Homestead-Miami Speedway.

However, as Stevens noted, nothing is guaranteed in terms of making the Championship 4. “I would rather be in that spot than any other spot, but I can’t tell you who is going to win next week and who is going to win the week after that,” he said. “The points might not make that much of a difference; it might make all the difference. It all depends on how many winners there are. The math changes quickly if you have a top-eight winner.”