Taking advantage of pit strategy in the final stage, Christopher Bell further shook up the playoff picture by winning Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
Bell led the final 42 laps around the 1-mile track to score his second career Cup win. His win leaves only two spots available for a driver to get in on points with six races left in the regular season.
After a fierce battle, Bell took the lead on a pass of Chase Elliott with 42 laps to go.
Their battle was a result of the final round of pit stops under caution, when Elliott and Bell restarted in 10th and 11th respectively with 92 laps to go. They were the first cars on four fresh tires. The nine cars in front of them either stayed out (three cars), took fuel only (one car) or two tires (four cars).
Elliott finished second.
Christopher Bell battling Chase Elliott for the lead (Photo: Dave Moulthrop)
“Adam, you’re the man,” Bell told his crew chief, Adam Steven, after taking the checkered flag. “I don’t know what you did, but you woke this thing up.”
“It was all you. You’re the Loudon master,” Stevens responded.
The victory for the No. 20 team follows Bell’s first win last year on the Daytona International Speedway road course. Bell had won at New Hampshire in all three of his NASCAR Xfinity Series starts at the track.
“Man, that was much needed right there,” Bell told NBC Sports at the start-finish line. “I’ll tell you what, that was a hell of a race from my viewpoint. That was so much fun racing with (Kurt Busch), (Joey Logano) and (Elliott). We were all running different lines. That was a blast. … it just seems like we’ve been so close and then we’ve fallen off a little bit last week.
“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 weeks I felt like we were pretty far away, but here we are today.”
Click here for the race results.
For Elliott, it’s his fourth consecutive finish inside the top two.
He won at Nashville Superspeedway, was runner-up at Road America, won at Atanta Motor Speedway, plus Sunday’s result.
Bell’s Loudon wins comes after the 301-lap race was dominated by his teammate, and fellow winless driver, Martin Truex Jr. Truex Started from the pole, led 173 laps and swept the first two stages. But the No. 19 team took just two tires on the final pit stop. Truex restarted fourth and quickly fell to 11th before battling back for a fourth-place finish.
Bubba Wallace, who started fourth, was one of the cars that took four tires on the final pit stop. He picked his way through the field to a third-place finish, matching the best of his career on a non-superspeedway track (Indianapolis, 2019). Prior to Sunday, Wallace hadn’t finished in the top 20 in four New Hampshire starts.
“I’m just proud of the team, proud of myself, proud of everybody at the shop. They brought a — I’m going to give them a ‘decent’ DraftKings Toyota Camry TRD,” Wallace said. “It didn’t handle that great but it had speed, so we knew that. Just the mental preparation, had to set yourself up for a long day, and we did.
“We had no idea what we were running there at the end,” Wallace said. “I knew it was inside the top five. But just tire management there at the end and we were able to capitalize. Just proud of everybody. Happy. It’s been hell for me the last month, so good to come out with a top five.”
Rounding out the top five was was Kevin Harvick.
The Stewart-Haas Racing driver started 10th and stayed in the top 10 for most of the race. He now has five top fives through 20 races and goes to Pocono Raceway next weekend trying to snap a 63-race winless streak.
“We put two tires on there, which we all thought was the right thing to do and it just would not get going,” Harvick said. “We were sliding up the race track and it took seven or eight laps to get the car underneath ya and then about 20 laps to get the pace back. Then at the end, everybody was just out of tires. I am proud of everybody on our GEARWRENCH Ford Mustang. We will keep plugging away.”
Brad Keselowski earned just his third top-10 finish of the season Sunday with a seventh-place finish.
But his day was most notable for what happened under the race’s final caution. Shortly after it came out, Richard Childress Racing’s Austin Dillon pulled up next to Keselowski’s No. 6 Ford and then swerved right into him.
Keselowski then retaliated, hitting back harder against Dillon’s No. 3 Chevrolet and then attempting to turn him. It wasn’t obvious by the end of the race what had led to Dillon’s initial act.
“Hot in the cars and we all let our tempers get the best of us,” Keselowski said before adding “I will talk to (Dillon) privately. I don’t need to be a jerk over the media.”
Keyword: Christopher Bell Rides Late Charge To New Hampshire Win