Christopher Bell came to New Hampshire in the final spot on the NASCAR Cup Series playoff grid. Two straight runs outside the top 15 had Kevin Harvick closing fast in the rear-view mirror and 13 race winners this season left Bell's bubble ready to burst.
No better way to fix that than by becoming a race winner yourself.
The latest twist in NASCAR's 2022 rollercoaster season came courtesy Bell's No. 20 Toyota, catching fire during the final stage of the Ambetter 301. Passing Chase Elliott for the lead with 42 laps remaining, Bell saved the best for last in cruising to a 5.4-second margin of victory, the largest in any race this season.
"Man, that one was much needed right there..." Bell said after the race. "I was talking to my best friend, and I told him, earlier in the year I felt like we were right on the verge of winning and then the last couple of weeks I felt like we were pretty far away, but here we are today."
Bell's shift in speed came during an ill-fated two-tire call for teammate Martin Truex Jr. While Truex led a race-high 172 laps, he didn't have the fresh rubber to stay competitive during a final stage that went caution free.
That seemed to throw the race Elliott's way until Bell started surging.
"At the end of that race," Bell said, "Basically the third stage my car was the fastest one out there, especially on the long run, and I did my job to maximize that."
There's something about this flat, 1.058-mile oval that works in Bell's favor, with five top-2 finishes in six career New Hampshire starts across NASCAR's Cup and Xfinity series. It's an impressive resume with success coming just two weeks after a pit crew swap between Bell and Bubba Wallace's two teams.
For Bell, it was the sixth different combination of crew members as Toyota deals with a season of struggles on pit road. The team also caught a lucky break one week after a wheel came off the car at Atlanta. Typically, that would lead to a flurry of four-race suspensions, but NASCAR decided it wasn't a true violation since the car never left pit road.
"To bring a couple new guys in would have been tough," crew chief Adam Stevens said. "I think that would have been the story."
Instead, the story became Stevens having the right touch as Bell claimed he was "in control" from the driver's seat hitting the stretch run. The head wrench has a history of working with temperamental drivers (see: two-time Cup champion Kyle Busch) and has quietly developed a similar understanding with Bell. In this case, silence was golden.
"Clearly, he did have it," Stevens laughed after the race. "Kudos to him."
Traffic Report
Green: Chase Elliott. Elliott was really hard on himself after New Hampshire, claiming you "should close out a race if you have the lead like that." I think he'll feel better this morning after taking a breath. Runs of first, second, first and second in the last four weeks have him peaking during a sizzling summer resembling how reigning Cup champion Kyle Larson climbed to the top last year.
Yellow: Bubba Wallace. A third-place finish was Bubba's best since the Daytona 500 and his first set of back-to-back top 15s all year. It's just too little, too late for a program that won't come close to sniffing the playoffs without a win.
Red: Ty Dillon. Dillon started the weekend losing his ride as both he and Petty GMS Motorsports mutually agreed to terminate his contract after the season. He ended it just five laps in after contact with Justin Haley led to a wreck that wiped out four cars, including Hendrick Motorsports' Alex Bowman (who has three DNFs in his last four races).
Speeding Ticket: Two tire stops. Both Martin Truex, Jr. and Kevin Harvick had the fastest cars over a long run. So why take two tires for track position they would have regained during a caution-free final stage? It was a disastrous call for two of the sport's best crew chiefs, James Small and Rodney Childers, that have put their drivers in difficult positions.
Truex is now fourth in points but now squarely on the playoff bubble as a winless driver. As for Harvick? He's 68 points outside the cutline and will almost certainly need a victory with six races left in the regular season.
"Obviously, we should have done four (tires), but that's hindsight," Truex said afterwards. "That's just Loudon for us. It's every year we lead a ton of laps, we run really well here, and then we find a way to give it away."
Oops!
The most shocking New Hampshire moment came when Austin Dillon and Brad Keselowski suddenly played a game of bumper cars under yellow. Seemingly out of nowhere, Dillon's No. 3 came after Keselowski's No. 6 on the backstretch, producing an aggressive response from the 2012 Cup Series champion.
"You guys saw it, right? Just hard racing, I guess," Dillon said. "We've gone at it a couple of times, the last two years. One time, I hit really hard. So, I just feel like the way certain people race me... probably not the right way to do it under caution."
Dillon was referring, of course, to a 2021 regular season race at Michigan where his potential winning car was wiped out after contact with Keselowski heading to the end of a stage.
"I'll talk to him privately," Keselowski said in response to Dillon's assertion. "I don't need to be a jerk through the media."
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July 19, 2022 at 12:17AM
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NASCAR Crash Course: Bell rings in New Hampshire as the No. 20 team now looks toward the playoffs - CBS Sports
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