Turning Point: How long will Christopher Bell’s Cup Series stranglehold last?

Here’s what’s happening in the world of NASCAR with Phoenix Raceway in the rearview and Las Vegas Motor Speedway (Sun., 3:30 p.m. ET, FS1) up next.

THE LINEUP

1️⃣ OK — who’s actually gonna stop this guy?

2️⃣ Four races in — is anybody sweating yet?

3️⃣ Why CBell, Adam Stevens aren’t worried about peaking too early

4️⃣ West Coast is the best coast for these drivers

5️⃣ Catch the pack — news and notes from around the garage

1. OK — who’s actually gonna stop this guy?

Drivers are stumped right now in their pursuit of ending Christopher Bell’s run. Is there anybody out there who can halt his hot streak at Las Vegas?

When Denny Hamlin exited his No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota on Sunday at Phoenix Raceway, all he could do was put his hands on his hips and stare off, at a loss for words, into the desert distance.

Short of dumping his teammate and making for an uncomfortable Monday afternoon in Huntersville, Hamlin did everything he could to outmaneuver Christopher Bell in the two-lap sprint to the finish … and yet the Oklahoma native, now in the midst of a dominant three-race win streak, remained insurmountable.

No. 20 is now the fourth driver in history to win three of the first four races of the season, the first to win three in a row since Kyle Larson’s 2021 championship season and the sole proprietor of JGR’s last five Cup Series wins. Considering the team’s 2024 lineup featured two easy first-ballot Hall of Famers before even examining his own resume, what Bell is doing on the race track so far in 2025 is just wild the more one thinks about it.

At this point, it can’t be very fun to race against Bell. This must be what it felt like watching a certain No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet run roughshod over the field in the late 2000s. Coincidentally, Bell has a good chance to become the first driver since Jimmie Johnson in 2007 to win four in a row.

The one saving grace for the field is that Bell has yet to win at Vegas — and JGR as a whole hasn’t won there in the Next Gen era — but, really, that’s just grasping at straws. Bell’s going to be great at Vegas. We know this.

But will anybody be greater?

You know what? I think so.

MORE: Full Las Vegas weekend schedule | Cup Series entry list

Not to take anything away from what Bell is doing, which is truly remarkable, but he has a gigantic target on his back right now. If you asked his competition, they’d all say something to the effect of “control what you can control … we’re only focused on ourselves, etc. etc.,” but I’m here to tell you it’s all hogwash. Literally every other driver in the field is singularly focused on doing exactly one thing right now — beating Bell.

The odds favor the field in that scenario, and had the first four race wins been split among four different names instead of one guy winning three of them, we would be talking about somebody else as the clear favorite this weekend — Kyle Larson.

The winner of two of the last three Las Vegas races is the unquestioned man to beat in Sin City, and Hendrick Motorsports — winners of five of the last eight there, including all four spring races in that span — is the team to beat. Larson’s 629 laps led there (second-most at any 1.5-mile track for him) are second all-time to Kevin Harvick (679), and there’s a significant chance he takes the top spot this weekend. No. 5 has earned a top five in almost half of his 17 Vegas starts and a 9.4 average finish is his best at any active intermediate track.

Just because a fellow driver is on a hot streak doesn’t just wash away recent history, which almost exclusively favors Larson over Bell here. Surely, they both know this. And surely, it’s eating Larson up watching his biggest rival take command of the series he had in the palm of his hand just a few seasons ago.

In our preseason coverage we highlighted this as the “rivalry to watch” in 2025 and it feels inevitable several more chapters will be written over the coming months. We already saw an entry on the final lap at Atlanta Motor Speedway a few weeks back.

Expect the next one to come this Sunday.

Joey Logano isn’t doing a whole lot to dispel that whole even year/odd year phenomenon.

Fresh off his third title — all of which came in an even-numbered year — there was reason to believe that Logano and crew chief Paul Wolfe, arguably the strongest pairing in the garage, would build off an exceptional playoff run and come out firing on all cylinders to start this season, odd-numbered year be damned.

Instead?

No. 22 is the first defending champion in Cup Series history to fail to earn a top-10 finish in the first four races of the following season. Not exactly how they drew it up, I’m guessing.

But is it that simple? Not quite, as Logano actually is having a decent campaign so far with plenty of speed in his No. 22 machine, sitting ninth in the standings by virtue of collecting the second-most stage points (46) of anybody so far to help buoy his positioning.

This points to how fluky and unpredictable the start to this season has been — one guy is winning most of the races while 29 of the 45 drivers to start a 2025 race have incurred a DNF, the most through four races since 2001. Thirty-three different drivers have a top-15 finish as well — the most through four races since 2001 and only the second time since 1985.

Some drivers we’re not used to seeing near the front are finishing well and the opposite is true, too.

But how many of them have reason to worry?

Logano is likely fine — and can probably toss his hat into the ring with Larson this weekend as one of Bell’s biggest threats — but his former Team Penske teammate and fellow champion Brad Keselowski is 33rd in points — tied for his worst start ever through four races since in a full-time career that started in 2010.

I’m just using him as an example among the many, and it’s possible Keselowski, a 2024 playoff driver, will be fine as well, but the underlying markers aren’t as favorable as they are for Logano. The No. 6 RFK Racing driver also has no top 10s — but he also has just nine stage points, with no laps led and a 28.3 average finish.

Again, four races … and 32 to go.

But some of these early season trends are likely to continue well into the summer months and perhaps beyond.

Just makes you wonder how many of these drivers and teams are confident in their processes and will stay the course hoping for a period of stabilization — or if the sweating is already starting and we could see shakeups sooner than normal as parity throughout the field increases and holes become too deep out of which to dig.