Christopher Bell has seen these roads before: Disappointment, frustration and the sting of a runner-up finish at Las Vegas Motor Speedway to open the Round of 8 with victory in his sights.
The last time he traversed that road, of course, was in 2023, when he followed it all the way to Victory Lane at Homestead-Miami Speedway the next week to lock himself into the Championship 4.
MORE: Homestead-Miami schedule | Playoff standings
Bell and his No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing team hope history repeats itself at the 1.5-mile oval in Florida on Sunday (2:30 p.m. ET, NBC, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, NBC Sports App).
Bell’s disappointment from last week’s Las Vegas finish was evident in the immediate aftermath, failing to lock his way into the Championship 4 by a mere 0.662 seconds as Joey Logano advanced with a win instead. Bell won the pole and led a race-high 155 laps before taking the checkered flag second.
“It’s funny because immediately after the race, I was just completely dejected,” Bell told NASCAR.com in a phone interview Tuesday. “And Adam (Stevens), my crew chief, he was feeling pretty optimistic about it. And then fast forward to yesterday. Monday is always our debrief day, and I was feeling pretty upbeat and ready to move on — and then he was feeling pretty dejected. So we were definitely on different timelines.
“But certainly, I think Monday is kind of the day where you just move past it. … So yeah, I feel pretty refreshed and ready to go get after it at Homestead now.”
Bell enters Homestead 42 points above the provisional elimination line, the top driver not yet locked in with a margin that appears comfortable with two races left in the round. But that buffer doesn’t feel quite as comfortable as it should, said Bell. Instead, he has eyes on the gaps to Kyle Larson and William Byron. Bell sits seven points ahead of Larson and 15 ahead of Byron.
“If Joey hadn’t have won the race, the plus-42 would be amazing,” Bell said. “But the fact that Joey won the race and the contenders for Homestead and Martinsville are the guys that are underneath the (elimination) line or underneath me in points, it makes it where it’s not safe because as soon as someone wins, that (elimination) line moves up, and then all of a sudden you’re racing, like you mentioned, the 24 (Byron) and the 5 (Larson) for points. So regardless of who wins at Homestead, I feel pretty confident that we’re at least going to have one more winner, and that makes the points battle really tight again.”
Bell, the 29-year-old Oklahoma native, returns to the South Florida track in far better shape than he did a year ago. Despite similar circumstances — those frustrating Las Vegas runner-up runs — Bell left Nevada two points below the dividing line in 2023.
“But with that being said, we’re still treating Homestead and Martinsville the same as what we did last year,” Bell said. “And if anything, [what] we can take from last year is the fact that we can win, and we can win any of these races. Homestead hasn’t notoriously been a great race track for me, and then last year we were able to win, so we’ve kind of checked that box, and we know that we’re going to be capable at these next two races.”
Indeed, Homestead had previously been “a thorn in [Bell’s] side” prior to last year’s triumph. In three starts from 2020-22, he led a total of four laps with finishes of eighth, 20th and 11th. But in the late stages of the 2023 contest, he surged to the front of the field to lead 26 laps and earn the win, fighting back to the top spot after losing spots late on pit road before passing William Byron for the winning move with 15 laps to go.
“Having success there definitely breeds confidence,” Bell said. “So yeah, it was very rewarding to be able to drive to the lead. And then, you know, we had that mishap that lost track position, and we were still able to come back and pass for the lead again. So yeah, just it makes me feel comfortable in my own skin, so to speak, and know that I am capable of running well at that race track.”
There’s something to be said for feeling comfortable in one’s own skin, especially for the perennially slept-on Bell. While the narrative remains that he is lurking in the shadows, he and his team are doing everything possible to put themselves front and center statistically. Bell is tied with Kyle Larson for a series-best 13 top fives this season and leads the Cup Series with 21 top-10 finishes. His 13.0 average finish is second-best to Chase Elliott’s 12.3, and no one has scored more points in the playoffs (265) than Bell, who’s accumulated six top 10s in seven postseason races.
Add that he is on the precipice of his third straight Championship 4 appearance in just his fifth year at the Cup level and it’s almost harder to fathom his lightning-fast rise.
“I think that I am definitely getting more confident in my abilities as I get more experience in the Cup Series, which obviously helps,” Bell said. “But honestly, the timing of my jump to Cup was what really hindered me my first couple years in the series.”
When Bell leaped from Xfinity to Cup for the 2020 campaign, rookie struggles were anticipated — but no one anticipated a global pandemic would cause interference with that learning process. Erased were the majority of practice and qualifying sessions for both the 2020 and 2021 seasons, most weekends resulting in a show-up-and-race schedule out during the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, there were bright spots for Bell, who collected one win, nine top fives and 23 top 10s in his first 72 starts.
Then came the introduction of the Next Gen car in 2022. While most of Bell’s newfound experience was wiped from the board, so too was the experience of the grizzled veterans around him, evening the proverbial playing field while also reintroducing practice and qualifying.
“That introduction of practice and qualifying was a huge step in my Cup Series career,” he said.
Now comes another opportunity to return to the Championship 4 for a third consecutive season. Since the Next Gen car debuted, parity has reigned supreme across the Cup Series, emphasized by the number of winners seen in each of the last three seasons: In 2022, 19 different racers won; 15 won in 2023; and 18 have won in 2024. Yet there stands Bell and his No. 20 team, who continue to rise above their competition when the sport’s stakes are highest.
“It’s more of a credit to my team members and the group of people that I’m driving for,” Bell said. “[…] They just step up to the plate, and they bring really, really fast race cars when it matters. And I think they do a great job of learning throughout the regular season of what the car needs (and) I need as a driver. And there’s been a lot of changes since the introduction of Next Gen through ’22, ’23 and now this year. So it’s not just copy-and-paste and fine-tuning the setup, because the Toyota bodies (changed). The way that the cars are creating downforce is changing. The setups are ever-changing.
“The first bit of ’22 was Adam getting acclimated to myself driving the car, what I needed in the car to be successful. And then on top of that, you go back to these tracks again next year with a car change, and the setups have to be a little bit different. So just learning throughout the regular season has been a big part of our success in the playoffs.”
It doesn’t hurt, either, that Bell is the most recent winner at Phoenix Raceway, where the title will be decided on Nov. 10. But Bell isn’t looking quite that far ahead yet — not with the work that remains in the Round of 8.
“With the way last year went at Homestead, I feel confident that we’ll be able to repeat and be competitive,” he said. “We all know how hard winning is, and everything has to go right. But I do feel comfortable and confident telling you that we will be competitive and we will be in the hunt.”