Christopher Bell’s afternoon at Texas Motor Speedway lasted about as long as a snowball in a blast furnace. And the truly cruel part is that, for a brief shining moment, it actually looked like Texas might finally stop treating him like a rented mule.
The Joe Gibbs Racing driver rolled the dice early Sunday, ducking onto pit road on lap 33 to trigger the first wave of green-flag pit stops in Stage 1. It was the sort of strategy call that either makes you look like a genius or leaves your crew chief staring into the distance questioning every life decision that led him here.
This time, it worked.
Once the cycle shook out, Chase Briscoe inherited the lead briefly, but there was Bell suddenly charging toward the front in air so clean and unfamiliar at Texas it practically needed a customs declaration. By lap 47, Bell was leading the race, a remarkable sight considering he had led exactly six laps total in his previous seven starts at the sprawling Fort Worth speed palace.
And then Texas remembered it was Texas.
On lap 69, Bell and teammate Denny Hamlin were slicing through traffic and battling for the lead entering Turn 4 when Todd Gilliland suddenly spun ahead of them. What happened next unfolded with all the grace of a shopping cart launched down a staircase.
“It was another one of those 50-50 calls,” Bell explained afterward. “Me and Denny were side by side and I saw him spinning and Denny lifted and I thought that I could shoot the gap on the bottom. And I thought I did shoot the gap on the bottom but I got clipped.”
“Clipped” may undersell it slightly. Bell spun down the frontstretch and slammed the outside wall hard enough to instantly vaporize what had been one of his most promising Texas runs in years.
And that’s the maddening thing about Bell’s recent stretch. The speed is there. The finishes are not.
At Kansas, Tyler Reddick wiped him out in overtime. At Talladega, Bell got collected on the final lap. Now at Texas, while leading and looking capable of controlling the race, he was once again reduced to an innocent bystander in someone else’s calamity.
The result adds another frustrating chapter to a stretch where Bell has now finished outside the top 15 in four of the last five races despite regularly unloading cars capable of running at the front.
Still, Bell sounded more irritated by the bad luck than concerned about the bigger picture.
“We don’t need to do anything,” Bell said when asked how the team turns things around. “I’m really thankful to have fast cars to drive, thankful to be driving for Joe Gibbs Racing, to be able to carry the Rheem colors and thankful I get another opportunity next week. It’s going to turn around at some point.”
And he’s probably right.
Because eventually the racing gods run out of anvils to drop on your roof.
Greg was a writer for DriveTribe supporting Amazon's The Grand Tour and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, and a Masters degree in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek and a regular contributor to Forbes.