HAMPTON, Ga. — Time away from the driver’s seat is not a friend, not after a barrel roll down Daytona International Speedway‘s frontstretch. One week removed from his frightening tumble, Christopher Bell is eager to get on the track again and put his dramatic wreck in the season opener behind him.
Bell, who is in his first full NASCAR Camping World Truck Series season, has flipped sprint cars a time or two, but his crash in the No. 4 Kyle Busch Motorsports Toyota was a first in stock-car racing. It was different in several ways, including having more time to think about the wreck afterward.
“In the open-wheel program, you race 100 races a year so you flip on Saturday and you’re back racing on Sunday,” the 21-year-old driver said before Friday’s NCWTS practice at Atlanta Motor Speedway. “Luckily, we didn’t have a huge break where you sit there and ponder it. So I’m looking forward to today and tomorrow to get Daytona behind us and I hope to start fresh.”
The physics of wrecking in NASCAR are different as well.
“The biggest thing about the stock car is it might not hurt as bad because you’ve got more material around you, but the G forces are say more. I think the biggest thing is you’re sitting to the left compared to an open-wheel car, you’re sitting in the center of the car so everything is flipping around you. In the stock cars, you’re off to the side of the truck, so whenever you start barrel rolling, you know, it’s trying to throw you out of the car.”
Bell did start fresh and fast on Friday, posting the second-fastest speed of 178.816 mph in the Truck Series’ first practice for Saturday’s Great Clips 200 (4:30 p.m. ET, FOX Sports 1). He’s competing in the truck that Erik Jones drove to the series championship in 2015. And he feels fine.
“When I stopped, you got a lot of adrenaline, so I felt really good. … But walking to the ambulance I was pretty dizzy and by the time I got there, I was really dizzy. As far as injuries, other than a little bit of bruising, I mean my face was a little bruised afterwards, but other than that I was fine. The next morning I felt 100 percent until I got out of bed, and once I got out of bed, I realized I couldn’t move quite as fast. But after a couple days that was all gone, and I was good to go.”
Bell is hopeful to keep pushing strong speed into Saturday’s race with some solid testing at Atlanta under the team’s belt. He got his first win while running seven races for KBM in 2015, taking the checkered flag at Eldora Speedway and is eager for another trip to Victory Lane.
But first, Bell is grateful to get back to racing and past the wreck. He said the accident could have been worse if the truck had taken a hard hit to the nose or been hit by another truck rather than dissipating energy as it rolled down the track.
“Looking back at it, I saw Larson’s crash then Austin Dillon last year,” Bell said. “You think, ‘That’s never going to happen to me. That’ll never happen to me.’ Then suddenly it is happening to you. Watching it was an eye opener. Even after I went through the crash it didn’t sink in, but whenever I got to watching myself flipping, it’s like ‘Wow, that did happen to me.’ It puts it in perspective.”