The third-year Cup driver at Joe Gibbs Racing had started the season getting caught up in a wreck in the Daytona 500 and a week later retired after 94 of 200 laps at Auto Club Speedway in California with engine failure.
After a 10th-place finish at Las Vegas – on a weekend where he did win the pole – he spun out at Phoenix and finished a disappointing 26th. That left him 30th in the series standings and seemingly a long way from a win or the playoffs.
Now, entering the season finale championship race at Phoenix Raceway this weekend, Bell is one of the four drivers eligible to win the series title joining Joey Logano, Chase Elliott and Ross Chastain.
Not only that, but he’s the only driver in the Championship 4 who has won more than one playoff race this season.
How times have changed
While Bell and his No. 20 JGR Toyota team always believed the potential existed to rise among the best that doesn’t mean there weren’t doubts – and plenty of obstacles to overcome – along the way.
“I remember telling Bell when we were (30th) in points, he was distraught and concerned,” Bell’s crew chief Adam Stevens explained.
“I’m like, ‘Dude, I do not know what you’re worried about. We have the performance, and the capability is right there, you’re just having trouble seeing it’.”
Said Bell, “You were definitely a lot more positive than I was in that moment.”
Stevens said he was confident Bell and the No. 20 “weren’t that far off” from the teams running up front each week.
“We suffered for finishing, we didn’t suffer for performance. We were certainly not a (30th)-place team,” Stevens said. “Our set-ups weren’t where they needed to be at the start with this new car, but we were learning.
“We were capable of running up front. We crossed the finish line at (first) Atlanta P2, got bumped to the back for going under the yellow line. We were up front (first) Vegas, got loose over the bumps and spun out racing for the lead.
“That was potential performance. Two top-fives gone that were well within our grasp.”
Slowly, the team inched back up the standings as its finishes began matching its performance on the track.
Bell finished third at Circuit of the Americas, led 63 laps and ended up sixth at Richmond, Va., and grabbed seventh at the Bristol Dirt Race.
As the season entered the spring and early summer months, Bell found his groove. He put together a string of five consecutive finishes of ninth or better to break into the top-10 of the standings by early June, giving him a chance to make the playoffs even if he didn’t earn a win.
But with NASCAR seeing an unprecedented number of different winners to start the year with the Next Gen car, making the playoffs without a victory was no certainty.
Finally getting to Victory Lane
Bell ended that doubt with a win July 17 at New Hampshire, in which he ran down 2020 series champion Elliott for the lead with 41 of 301 laps to go and held on for the victory.
Finally crashing Victory Lane seemed to provide come concrete evidence Bell and the No. 20 team could be a contender in the playoffs.
“We had a stretch of some good finishes and good runs,” Stevens said. “We’ve been competitive. We’ve had some pit stops get away from us. We’ve had some strategy calls get away from us.
“As a team, though, we knew that we had what we needed.”
Bell, 27, entered the 2022 playoffs as the 10th seed (of 16 drivers) with one win and two stage victories during the regular season.
His performance exploded in the first round as he was the only driver who finished in the top-five in all three races (Darlington, S.C., Kansas and Bristol, Tenn.).
Still, with no additional wins and the re-seeding that occurs after each round, Bell had faced a difficult road to continue to advance in the playoffs.
Win ... and you're in
It got much harder in the second round as he wrecked out of the Texas race and finished a disappointing 17th at Talladega, Ala. That put him in danger of elimination at the Charlotte Roval, needing a win to advance.
And that’s exactly what he did.
Thanks to a timely pit call for four new tires on the next-to-last caution, Bell barreled through the field, passed leader Kevin Harvick on the start of overtime and claimed the victory and automatic advancement to the semifinal round.
“The round of 12 was extremely disheartening because I felt like the (semifinal) round was going to be really good for us, and that would have led to a possible championship run,” Bell said. “But then when we got out of Texas with a DNF, Talladega sucked, just being so down.”
Heading into a semifinal round with renewed confidence and featuring tracks on which he typically performs well, Bell got a rude awakening when he got wrecked out of the Las Vegas race, caught up in Bubba Wallace’s retaliation against Kyle Larson.
An 11th-place finish a week later at Homestead, Fla., did little to improve his points position entering the final elimination race this past Sunday at Martinsville (Va.) Speedway.
Once again, he needed a win to advance. And once again, he delivered.
Bell pit for new tires on the final caution and lined up sixth on the restart with 24 of 500 laps remaining. He then methodically ran down and passed Chase Briscoe with four laps to go to reclaim the lead and held off Larson by 0.869 seconds for the win.
Suddenly, the driver once relegated to 30th in points had his third win of the season and was locked in as one of the four who will compete for the series title.
“It’s just been a roller coaster of emotions for sure,” Bell said. “The team behind me, everyone at Joe Gibbs Racing, they still performed to their highest level.
“I feel like whenever I get in the car, put my helmet on, I try and do as good of a job as I can of not letting anything bother me.”
While Bell’s trip to the Championship 4 was certainly filled with drama and a pair of do-or-die moments, it may have overshadowed the fact that his appearance shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise.
Even with two DNFs in the nine playoff races, Bell has scored the fourth-most points in the playoffs thus far (299), just 38 less than leader Denny Hamlin, who had no DNFs.
Upon closer look, it’s easy to see that Bell and his No. 20 team have been one of – and arguably the best – performing teams during this season when it’s counted the most.
It’s a fact certainly not lost on Stevens.
“It’s been there. (The performance) has been there the whole time,” he said. “We just haven’t had as many opportunities to show it as maybe we felt like we deserved or had coming to us.
“Hopefully, we got one more in us.”
Most points scored so far in 2022 NASCAR Cup playoff races
| Driver | Points Awarded | DNFs in playoffs |
| Denny Hamlin | 337 | 0 |
| William Byron | 324 | 0 |
| Ross Chastain | 303 | 0 |
| Christopher Bell | 299 | 2 |
| Kyle Larson | 297 | 1 |
