Champagne celebration: Chase battle tightens as Bell pops the top at Darlington

DARLINGTON, S.C. -- Christopher Bell was downright jubilant in his first visit to Darlington Raceway's Victory Lane, grabbing one of the champagne bottles for an obligatory post-race dousing of colleagues. Given his space in between wins -- 33 races, nearly a full season -- his slight trouble with the cork could be forgiven. Bell eventually popped the top after Sunday's Cook Out Southern 500, joyously releasing both a spray of bubbly and the built-up tension that came with an agonizing streak of seven runner-up finishes before his first win of the NASCAR Cup Series season. "Tickled to death," he said, with a hint of sweet-tea drawl. But the long-awaited triumph meant much more, helping the No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing team shake its regular-season doldrums and stamping out a convincing opening salvo -- for himself and Toyota -- in The Chase presented by Mobil 1. RELATED: Race results | At-track photos: Darlington The path to get there was difficult, especially at one of the circuit's most demanding tracks. Explaining the euphoria was far easier. "It's probably that damn winless streak that I was on," Bell said, beaming. "You know, makes me probably appreciate this more and soak it in more, and you never know when your next one's going to come, if this is your last one, and yeah ... that was too long." Darlington delivered again as a grueling opening scene in the 10-race championship fight. Top-seeded Denny Hamlin's advantage in the Cup Series standings was cut in half after a midrace tangle with Michael McDowell that impaired his No. 11 JGR Toyota's drive. William Byron, another former Darlington winner, dropped to the floor of The Chase field after an odd spin and mechanical failure that left Hendrick Motorsports' competition brass scrambling for answers in the dimly lit garage. And Carson Hocevar, who rallied to a top five at Darlington with some swagger in the spring, added to his list of enemies with an air of ambivalence, defiance or a blend of both after giving veteran Brad Keselowski the business. Bell's group wasn't immune to the challenges of the 500-mile endurance test, either. Bell had just won Stage 2 when a pit stop during the intermission went awry; a bobble on the right-front tire exchange cost the No. 20 team precious time, and Bell rolled out 12th for the start of the final segment. Resilience and a pep talk from crew chief Adam Stevens kept the group in the game, and Bell's charge back toward the front of the field aided the recovery. It was a matter of shaking off the down moments, both in Sunday's race and the regular-season rough patches that had preceded it. "I'm a firm believer in it's not how you start, it's how you finish," Derrell Edwards, the No. 20 team's jack man, told NASCAR.com. "If you look at the media and everything everyone was saying, they just weren't sure if we could figure it out or get that win. We had seven second-place finishes coming into tonight, but it's zero-zero when it comes to The Chase, and that's how we approached it. Even us in the pit stops, we knew this was going to be a grind. We knew this was 500 miles of racing, we know it's going to be a lot of pit stops tonight. They all weren't pretty, but that's OK. It's not always going to be pretty, you know what I mean? It's a grind. At the end of it, it's about who walks away with the trophy." Bell's frustrations of being so close to a breakthrough had been more and more public as the losses mounted, but those setbacks were shared. "I mean, I'm sure it's been really hard on them," Bell said of his crew. "A lot of people on this team are doing their job, like they're doing their job and they deserve to be in Victory Lane, and it just hasn't worked out. And so I just, I love those guys. I mean, they're incredible at what they do, and the fact that they had that hiccup at the end of Stage 2, and they had 100 and something laps -- whatever it ended up being, two or three more pit stops. They had to shake that and get back to work, and they showed up and did it, and I think that speaks to their experience level." The outcome also told volumes about how ship-shape Toyota is at the moment. Five of the top eight finishers at Darlington came from the automaker's fleet, including a 1-2-3 sweep at the top of the order. Other manufacturers had glimmers Sunday. Chevrolet's Kyle Larson showed signs of inching toward his own streak-snapping day by leading a race-high 99 laps and finishing fifth, and Team Penske's Ryan Blaney stayed steady as the top force from Ford, also notching a top five. MORE: Cup Series standings  Though Darlington's numerous plot twists tightened the Chase standings, five of the top six atop the Cup Series heap come from the Toyota camp. Joe Gibbs Racing co-owner Heather Gibbs was quick to acknowledge that being the favorites also brings a golden opportunity for a title, which would be the organization's first since 2019. Anything less, she said, would be a missed chance. "I think absolutely," Gibbs said. "I mean, I think we’ve worked so hard as a team and as an organization to be consistent and have four competitive cars. Obviously points, coming, showing up every week, just as Christopher has, having all those top twos where it’s criticized, and that makes a championship-caliber team to be consistent. I think absolutely, it would be a disappointment. We need to capitalize on points. Stage points obviously is huge. It showed up tonight." Points haven't been the issue for the reliably consistent Bell, who reached The Chase's mythical top six on that steady road through the regular season. But Bell also acknowledged that scoring wins would be crucial for postseason success, with the points premium giving a preferred route to more substantial gains. Proof of that came at Darlington, where a four-position jump in the standings left him just 12 points behind Hamlin, his teammate. Overcoming the block on winning, Stevens said, was helped by a focus on wiping the slate clean each week. That's harder to do when one of the Chase Media Day questions last week asked Bell to rank his runner-up finishes from least palatable to most. The 31-year-old Oklahoma native smiled through it. Four days later, that regular-season baggage feels like old news. "You know, you have stretches like that in this sport," Stevens said. "Maybe this one was a little bit unprecedented, but it happened, and then it didn’t happen because we weren’t doing the right things as a team. That’s what you have to stress to him." The slate now seems even more clean for the remaining Chase races after an opportune postseason reset. All four Joe Gibbs Racing teams now have tallies in the win column, and Bell's confounding drought is no more. Victory champagne aside, the No. 20 team's potential might be the next thing that's fully uncorked. "We're gonna be really scary. Everybody better look out now," Edwards said. "We got over that hump that we couldn't get over throughout the regular season. It's gonna be a problem. We're right back where we belong. We never stopped believing, though -- our road group, mechanics, our pit crew -- we never stopped believing. We knew it was gonna just turn over and look at us now. So, crown-jewel race, baby. Let's go."