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Christopher Bell’s win streak is already historic — and it might not be over yet

Neil Paine

James Gilbert | Getty Images

Many of the usual road-course suspects were out in force for Sunday’s race at Circuit of The Americas in Austin, Texas. Kyle Busch, Shane Van Gisbergen, Tyler Reddick, Michael McDowell, AJ Allmendinger and William Byron all led laps -- and all are among NASCAR Cup Series drivers who’ve won on road courses. But in the end, the race ultimately belonged to a driver who had just won the previous week at a dramatically different style of track: Christopher Bell, who mastered not only COTA’s twists and turns but also the pack-style drafting of Atlanta Motor Speedway. In the process, Bell etched his name in NASCAR history -- and he now has a chance to accomplish an even rarer feat on Sunday at Phoenix Raceway (3:30 p.m. ET, FS1, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). So, let's look at how Bell's back-to-back wins compare to other drivers in history and see what his chances are of pulling off three wins in a row. RELATED: Why COTA was the best road-course race of the Next Gen era We aren't used to seeing consecutive race winners very often in the Cup Series, especially in recent years. In the average season of the Gen 4 (1992-2007) or Car of Tomorrow (2007-2012) chassis, there were at least four instances per year of back-to-back winners. But the Gen 6 cars only yielded 3.3 cases of consecutive winners per season, and the Next Gen car has only given us an average of one back-to-back winner per year:
Before Bell won twice in the past two weekends, there hadn’t been a consecutive winner in the Cup Series since Chris Buescher in the middle of the 2023 season. Last year featured zero cases of back-to-back winners, the first season since 1984 in which that was the case. So, Bell just jolted us out of a long stretch of 51 straight races won by different drivers. But he also did it in a special way -- winning at a drafting-style track (I still sometimes call them “plate” tracks, even though I know we use tapered spacers now) and then a road course. Going back to the dawn of the modern era of the Cup Series in 1972, there have been only five such instances of back-to-back winners, with Bell being the first since Tony Stewart in 2005 at Sonoma Raceway and Daytona International Speedway:
Bell also became the first modern Cup Series driver to do it in this particular order -- a superspeedway first, then a road course. As impressive as all of that is, though, there’s a good chance Bell isn’t done yet. The Cup Series heads to Phoenix, where Bell won last spring and has finished 10th or better in four of his past five starts. I have a track-scouting system that ranks drivers each week based on their average Driver Rating at the track in question -- plus all similar tracks -- over this and the previous three seasons combined. Based on Bell’s performance at Phoenix -- plus its fellow shorter flat tracks at Richmond Raceway, World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway and New Hampshire Motor Speedway -- he shows up as the No. 1 projected driver among series regulars this weekend:
Just to give a sense of how good Bell has been at this class of tracks recently, he made six starts at Phoenix, Richmond, Gateway and Loudon last season and scored two wins, finishing within the top six five times and never finishing worse than seventh. In other words, Bell ought to be at or near the top of the favorites list on Sunday, meaning he will probably make a strong run at a third consecutive win. And that, in turn, offers the chance for even more history to be made early this season. Since 1972, there have been only 28 total cases of the same driver winning at least three races in a row, and none of them has occurred in the Next Gen era; the last season it happened was 2021, when Kyle Larson did it on two different occasions. Aside from Larson, nobody has pieced together a three-race win streak since 2018, when Kevin Harvick, Kyle Busch and Brad Keselowski each did it in the same year. It’s a pretty special club of drivers to be a part of, too, with only 17 members in history -- and they’re just about all legends, with Harry Gant being the only inclusion who doesn’t rank among the 30 winningest drivers in Cup history: If Bell joins the club, he would have 12 Cup wins, six fewer than Handsome Harry racked up in his career. But Bell would also stake claim to maybe the most impressive three-race win streak of them all. Phoenix is a tough track to pin down; at exactly 1 mile with minimal banking and a distinctive dogleg, it defies easy classification as either a regular speedway -- nobody would mistake it for Michigan International Speedway, Las Vegas Motor Speedway or Kansas Speedway -- or a short track. But no matter how you classify it (my ratings consider it an “oval”), a Bell victory would mean he would have won three straight races at three different types of tracks, coming off those wins at a drafting track and a road course. Out of all the legends above, only two can say they did the same: David Pearson, who won consecutively at Darlington (oval), Martinsville (short track) and Talladega (superspeedway) in 1973; and Mark Martin, who did it at Watkins Glen (road course), Michigan (oval) and Bristol (short track) in 1993. (Martin then won at Darlington to join the super-exclusive club of four-straight winners.) Bell has a real chance to land in that group, especially given his track record at Phoenix and other similar sites. That’s a level of versatility that even most of the sport’s greatest legends never achieved. And for a driver with clear championship potential, don’t be surprised if a historic early-season hot streak for Bell leads to something much bigger by season’s end.