Christopher Bell had NASCAR three-peat in sight since move to JGR in 2021
Kyle Larson’s trio of victories in 2021 had served as inspiration for Christopher Bell and his crew chief
Joe Gibbs Racing ace Christopher Bell says he and his crew chief had been dreaming about clinching three consecutive race wins in the NASCAR Cup Series since he joined the team in 2021.
Bell became just the 29th driver in the history of the championship to complete the famous three-peat after leading a JGR 1-2 in Sunday’s Shriners Children's 500 at Phoenix Raceway. He had already won the previous two rounds at Atlanta and Austin.
The last driver to achieve that feat was Hendrick Motorsports’ Kyle Larson, who scored a trio of consecutive wins on two separate occasions in his title-winning 2021 season.
Bell revealed that his crew chief Adam Stevens made him believe that it would be possible to emulate Larson’s success when he joined Joe Gibbs Racing four years ago, as he recalled a conversation from 2021.
“Three straight [wins], it's surreal,” he said. “I will never forget 2021, my first year with Adam Stevens, [when] Kyle Larson won three straight.
“Me and Adam got off to a rocky start. We are sitting in his office at JGR, and he looked at me and said we can do this.
“He said I want to do these three straight sitting in these exact two same chairs talking about him and Kyle Busch. I said I know that we can do this. It took a while to get here but we finally did it.
“I'm so proud of all of the mechanics, the engineers, Adam, the pit crew members, everybody on this no 20 car.
“What you are seeing is everybody pulling the rope in the same direction, everybody doing their jobs to the best of their abilities.
“This is what I knew that could come out of this from the team, and I will say it came from Adam. I didn't know what was capable of this team, Adam knew what was capable of this team, and we are finally starting to see the fruit of it.”
Bell was on course for a comfortable victory at Phoenix until a late caution caused by the other JGR Toyota of Ty Gibbs threw a spanner in the works.
But the 30-year-old managed to fend off his teammate Denny Hamlin as well as Larson’s Chevrolet to take a narrow 0.049s victory.
The Oklahoma native admitted that he faced the worst-case scenario on option tyres as the race resumed with just two laps remaining.
“Whenever you are sitting there dreaming it up, that's about as ugly as it gets,” he said immediately after the race.
“You put the red tyres on, you are like alright what I don't want to happen is go 20-30 laps and get a yellow. then that happened. “Then we went 10 more laps and we had another yellow.
“Then it was all about who could get clear on the restart, neither of us could. We were just racing really really hard there coming to the line. JGR 1-2, how about that!”
