Ross Chastain is so accustomed to receiving blame for on-track incidents that he and his team joked about potential comments from Christopher Bell last Sunday at Richmond.
With Chastain on the bottom of a three-wide scenario and Bell in the middle after a restart on Lap 380, Bell moved up the track, tapped Byron’s left-rear quarter and spun the No. 24 Chevrolet.
Bell’s characterization of Chastain’s move to fill the bottom lane was anything but charitable.
“The wrecking ball came in and made us three-wide at the last second, and there wasn’t enough room to be three-wide,” Bell said.
To say that Chastain was shocked to be called a wrecking ball in that instance is the height of understatement, even though Chastain has been a convenient whipping boy whenever he’s near an accident on track.
“So what’s so crazy,” Chastain said, “we got out (of the car at Richmond), and one of my guys jokingly said, ‘What are they going to say about you? What’s the 20 (Bell) going to say about you?’ And we laughed, because we didn’t think anything.
“And then we hear about it a couple of minutes later, and we were like jaws on the ground. It caught us completely by surprise to get blamed for that.”
Bell initially also blamed Byron for crowding him, but after seeing video of the incident, he apologized—to Byron, not to Chastain.
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