Christopher Bell is pleased to have won last week at Bristol Motor Speedway but there wasn’t a lot to take out of it to indicate anything meaningful about his chances the rest of the season.
For one, Bell thinks he was kind of lucky to have a won a race that featured a ton of intended tire cording, which came down to who had enough fresh right sides at the end of the race.
They did and the Joe Gibbs Racing No. 20 team held off Brad Keselowski on a similar strategy.
“Certainly, winning helps but we didn’t lead laps,” Bell said. “Once again, I won a race, but I didn’t lead laps which is okay. I will gladly take that. Last week was just such unique circumstances. We kind of won the lottery last week.
“Whoever won that race was going to have to have a substantial amount of luck and fortunately it was on our side. But I don’t know. I think we had a great car, but I think a lot of people would’ve said the same thing, and we got really fortunate last week. So, it was kind of a unique circumstance that played out. So, I don’t know that it necessarily was a true test of where the teams stack up.”
Bell won three races in a row early in the season but also didn’t lead a lot of laps in doing so. He hasn’t had one of the dominant cars of the summer either. He has only led 239 laps this season compared to 1,145 over all of last season.
His 13.5 average starting spot is also well below his 11.2 from last year and that still concerns him.
“What we have to do better, is we’ve got to start qualifying better,” Bell said. “That is mission critical. Oh, my goodness. All of us are – we’re frustrated a little bit of how we’ve qualifying especially compared to our team cars. I say that because the team cars are the barometer. If the team cars are qualifying well, then you should be qualifying well too.”
Chase Briscoe and Denny Hamlin have combined to win nine poles and Bell has just one in a summer where he struggled to even start inside the top-10.
Why is that important?
“Whenever you get deeper into the Playoffs, you have to be scoring stage points, and a lot of the stage points are dictated by your qualifying effort,” Bell said. “So, yeah, that’s mission critical. We’ve got to start qualifying better, and along the lines of qualifying better, that’s how you lead laps. I think a lot of it stems from the qualifying and that’s probably the biggest performance gain that we need to go out there and be one of the top contenders.
“I feel like our race performance has been on par with most of our competitors, it’s just we’re starting from a hole after Saturday.”
Bell says his car just hasn’t had the balance his teammates have had on Saturdays this year.
“We have the capability and the teammates are showing we have the capability if we just get it right,” Bell said. “And, we just have been off a little bit, and it doesn’t take much to be a couple positions back. Our teammates have just been hitting it and getting the good qualifying results. We’re missing a little bit. Some of it has been on the balance side and some of it has been on the driving side as well. All of us – myself, Adam (Stevens, crew chief), the engineers, we all have to just buckle down and improve that if we want to go deeper here.”
With the win, Bell starts this round with five additional playoff points, the difference between being just 15 above the cutline and now starting at 20 above. Maybe last week was a lottery but it was a additive result heading into a round that favors Bell, historically.
“I think, you look at the race tracks on paper and they say that we should be really good at all of these tracks, and we should be able to have good performance,” Bell said. “The toughest thing is just going to be going out there and doing it and not eliminating yourself. I think that all of us, myself, Denny (Hamlin) and Chase (Briscoe) – even Bubba (Wallace) and Tyler (Reddick) – all of the Toyotas, they’re going to have speed.
“We’re going to be capable so just got to dot your i’s and cross your t’s and do your job. I think if it’s up to car performance, we’ll probably be fine but the execution side and finishing the races out, making sure that you make the right decisions on restarts, the right strategy calls, not making mistakes on long green flag runs – stuff like that — is going to be the difference maker in the Round of 12.”
