(Photo: Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images)
By Aaron Bearden
After each NASCAR Cup Series race, Motorsports Beat will share a piece breaking down the stories and takeaways from the weekend. This is a report on the O’Reilly Auto Parts 253 from the Daytona International Speedway road course.
NASCAR Cup Series
Who Won?
Christopher Bell. He chased down Joey Logano over the final laps for a breakthrough first win.
Top Stories
One down. More to come?
There have been many words used to describe Christopher Bell’s first NASCAR Cup Series win on Sunday evening – surprise, statement, breakthrough, feel-good.
Bell himself hopes it’s a sign of things to come.
Because at Joe Gibbs Racing winning is an expectation, not a surprise.
“I knew going to Joe Gibbs Racing that this is my time,” Bell said after Sunday’s victory on the Daytona road course. “I’m either going to put up or shut up. I’m very grateful for how it’s played out so far between the first two weeks.
“It’s a dream come true to be able to drive for the Coach, have all of our great partners. Those guys are who made it happen.”
A three-time Chili Bowl Nationals winner known for his prowess on dirt, Bell has gradually ascended the NASCAR ladder on asphalt over the past half-decade. He won a championship in the Camping World Truck Series back in 2017, dominated stretches of the Xfinity Series slate in 2018 and 2019 then made the humble step up to Cup with the now-defunct Leavine Family Racing in 2020.
The Oklahoman showed promise in his first year, but he wasn’t a playoff contender. Yet his potential was still enough for JGR to make a difficult decision, shifting him over to the main team for 2021 in place of fellow rising star Erik Jones despite the Michigander’s victories at Daytona and in Darlington Raceway’s prestigious Southern 500 in recent years.
It was a gamble, but Bell was positioned for success. He was paired with two-time champion Adam Stevens atop the box and allowed in the same equipment as his future hall of fame teammates Kyle Busch, Denny Hamlin and Martin Truex Jr.
The season-opening Daytona 500 started rocky when Bell kicked off a massive crash on Lap 14 with an errant push to Aric Almirola. But the 26-year-old bounced back in a major way in Sunday’s second Cup race on the Daytona road course.
When Truex and the dominant Chase Elliott were caught out on strategy and late accidents, Bell found himself chasing down former JGR driver and current Team Penske star Joey Logano in the closing laps of the race.
He caught Logano coming out of the infield section with two laps remaining, drove higher than the 2018 champion could block going into oval Turn 3 and surged past Logano heading into the front stretch chicane.
One lap later Bell took the checkered flag and began to soak in the joy of his maiden Cup triumph. He emerged from his No. 20 Toyota on the front stretch, stood atop it and raised his fists above his head in celebration as the small, socially-distanced crowd cheered him on.
The win came as a relative surprise, though perhaps it shouldn’t have. Bell’s talent made him a constant threat in all races at NASCAR’s lower levels, including an Xfinity Series triumph at Road America in 2019.
But Bell had endured a quiet rookie season and wasn’t known for road course prowess in particular prior to Daytona. If he was going to be a favorite somewhere, it was likely to be the Bristol Motor Speedway dirt race – though he hadn’t even celebrated much success on dirt in 2020.
Bell called 2020 “one of the hardest seasons I’ve ever had in my racing career” when reflecting on it after Sunday’s win.
“I won a (preliminary) race at the Chili Bowl, and that was it for the rest of the year. That’s obviously up against the Cup guys and on the dirt side, too. (Last year) was a really, really low point for me.
“To be able to come back in ’21 and win in the Cup Series this early on a road course is something that I’m going to cherish for the rest of my life.”
The win was an important one for Bell’s career. It locked the young Toyota prospect into his first Cup playoff appearance before any of his teammates and made good on JGR’s bet to place him in the car over a proven winner in Jones.
It also capped off a unique weekend for JGR, coming after Ty Gibbs’ shock victory in his Xfinity Series debut. At just 18 years old, the grandson of team owner Joe Gibbs is the latest in a line of Toyota stars hoping for Cup chances with JGR like Harrison Burton and Brandon Jones, along with Cup castaways like Daniel Hemric, John Hunter Nemechek and Ty Dillon.
Each is hoping for a chance to do what Bell just did some day – so it’s all the better for Bell that’s he’s done so first and given early justification to his own opportunity.
“I just want so bad to be in this No. 20 car for the rest of my career,” Bell said. “I need to perform well to do that. I just got to stay after it.”
Road course questions
Bell’s breakthrough is likely to endure as the lasting memory from Sunday’s Cup Series showdown. But in the immediate aftermath of the race, questions about NASCAR’s road course protocol led the talking points.
That’s largely attributable to the misfortune that befell the sport’s reigning champion and most popular driver, Chase Elliott.
Elliott was the dominant car in the O’Reilly Auto Parts 253, leading a race-high 44 laps and quickly driving through the field whenever he was trapped in the pack. But the Georgian was caught out when a Lap 57 caution for light rain nullified his lead and altered the complexion of the race.
Seeing the value of fresh tires, Elliott’s No. 9 Chevrolet was called to pit road under the ensuing caution flag as some others stayed out. But a slow stop trapped the Hendrick Motorsports star deep in the pack, requiring him to be aggressive to try to claw his way out of the deficit.
What ensued was a chaotic cluster of issues. Elliott was caught up in multiple instances of contact, briefly went off-track and finally spun around on his own while trying to make a pass. He was able to keep his car rolling, but finished a disappointing 21st.
Despite coming up short, Elliott agreed with the decision to pit after the race.
“When you have those late-race cautions like that and you have a mixed bag of who stays and who goes, it’s a bit of a gamble either way, I felt like,” Elliott said. “I thought tires was the right move. Tires won the race, so I think it was the right move.
“You get back in traffic and it just gets to be so chaotic, and then just depending on who gets through and who doesn’t kind of determines how it’s going to shake out.
“I hate it. I made too many mistakes. We went off track and it was just a bad deal. We had a fast NAPA Chevy and I appreciate the effort.”
While Elliott owned up to his mistakes and blamed himself for the loss, the circumstances that led him to be in that position were called into question afterward.
Light rain falling over the track was what called NASCAR to throw the caution prior to those fateful pit stops, giving teams an opportunity to take on wet weather tires.
Drivers like Denny Hamlin and Brad Keselowski acknowledged the moisture. But the track never got fully damp and all of the teams that pitted took on slicks, making the caution good for little other than bunching the field up and kicking off an eventful closing stanza that saw multiple cars crashed and positions lost.
Cup Series director Scott Miller described the decision as “a difficult call” in a Monday conversation with SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.
“So what we really wanted to avoid, and why we threw that caution, was we didn’t want the drivers thinking that the track was dry,” Miller said. “There was no way the spotters can know, there’s no way anybody can really know that it’s raining hard in those couple of corners except us with our turn spotters reporting back and our chase vehicles reporting back.
“So we didn’t want to send the field into those corners with a wet surface and then be completely unaware. That’s why the caution came out there.”
The end of the race was dramatic, but messy. While Bell was passing Kurt Busch and chasing down Logano, numerous drivers were sent off-course and saw runs that were previously good come to an unfortunate end. Even the race winner acknowledged the lottery-like aspect of restarts.
“Whenever you get restarts, everyone is boxed up, just running into each other, that’s the side of road course racing I don’t love,” Bell said. “Being at the mercy of everyone else, it gets a little bit superspeedway-ish on the restarts.”
“I just hate it’s so easy to get caught up in other people’s mess,” he later continued. “It’s so easy for guys to poke you, spin you out.”
The validity of the caution flag was called into question following Sunday’s race, as were several questions over the proper format for road course races.
Should NASCAR even throw a caution for rain at all, or should teams have to adapt to the conditions live? Do stage breaks ruin the flow and strategy of road course races? What about local yellows – should NASCAR embrace saving the full-course yellow for significant accidents and utilize more localized caution areas like many road racing tours? Is that even feasible when many get stuck off-course or shed debris?
These are all things to consider as NASCAR moves forward with a season consisting of more than double the prior amount of road course races at the Cup level.
“I think part of what people love about watching us race on road courses is the fact that the cars drive so incredibly awful bad that it can sometimes make for a very compelling race because there are a ton of mistakes, ” Keselowski said after Sunday’s race. “I think normally you don’t see that at most types of NASCAR racing, so with that in mind the cars not being made for the track, there are some considerations that NASCAR has to make that I’m sure they would rather not make.”
“The alternative is we could go back and run more short tracks,” he later continued. “I think I would be OK with that, but as of now that’s not the way the pendulum has swung, and we’ll have to reap what we sow.”
Playoff Nerves
Two weeks into a 26-race regular season would seem too early to talk about the playoffs, but making the postseason has to be a genuine concern for some of the traditional stars at NASCAR’s top level.
Sunday’s win for Bell was the second surprise victory of the young 2021 season, with both he and Daytona 500 champion Michael McDowell securing their first Cup trophies. That’s only the third time a season has opened with a pair of maiden Cup winners, with the other two coming back in 1949 and 1950.
The difference between now and seven decades ago is that there is a playoff structure to the championship, and the current format means that both Bell and McDowell are locked into the postseason before the arrival of spring.
Bell was a potential threat to crack the playoff field anyway on points, but McDowell was a true surprise and neither driver would have been on many lists of early win predictions. With both already secured in the postseason field, just 14 positions remain for those that have made the playoffs before.
For drivers hoping to crack the championship field on points, that’s a problem – particularly when many of them like Matt DiBenedetto, Tyler Reddick and Austin Dillon finished outside of the top-30 in Sunday’s race.
The only way to ensure a safe summer at this stage is to find a way to victory lane.
“The dynamic has changed dramatically right now,” Keselowski said of the playoff picture. “We’re very early in the season, and it’s now turned into a points race for those last few spots. Hopefully, it doesn’t matter for us.
“I think that we’ll be able to go to Richmond and Martinsville and some of those tracks and contend for the win and hopefully bring home wins, but if you don’t win, you’re in a lot of trouble right now because it’s not looking like you’re going to be able to get in the playoffs right now without a win.”
There will still likely be a few spots available on points. There have never been 16 different regular season winners during the NASCAR playoff era, and occasional surprise winners are nothing new – see AJ Allmendinger (2014), Chris Buescher (2016) and Cole Custer (2020).
But with surprise winners coming out of the gate this year, the pressure to perform has ramped up far earlier than normal. It’s going to be a tense regular season for any drivers that find themselves on or near the playoff bubble.
Notes
- There’s having a bad race, then there’s actively throwing up in your helmet with multiple laps remaining. Daniel Suarez had a rough day at the office on Sunday but finished a respectable 16th for the new Trackhouse Racing team.
- AJ Allmendinger endured a difficult Xfinity Series result on Saturday after he crashed battling for the Stage 1 win with Austin Cindric. He returned for a rare Cup start on Sunday with Kaulig Racing and capitalized on the opportunity, putting together a consistent race to finish seventh.
- Ryan Preece only had two top-10s in all of 2020. Thrown into a non-chartered ride without the guarantee of a full season, he’s already matched that total with a pair of top-10s in Daytona.
- Kurt Busch finished a solid fourth in Sunday’s race, which was great. But you could argue that it should have been better. He crashed from the lead during the final stage and had other adventures along the way.
- Chase Briscoe restarted everywhere from the tail to the front row throughout Sunday’s race, but the rookie was in contention late until damage from a stack-up behind the spinning Elliott caused his hood to fly up. He was black-flagged afterward and left with a car missing some hardware.
- Bubba Wallace was something of a non-factor for 23XI Racing, struggling throughout the day before ending his race damaged in 26th. With multiple road courses on the schedule, the team may have some work to do to on those tracks to help propel Wallace into playoff contention.
- Scott Heckert made his Cup debut on Sunday for Live Fast Motorsports, coming home a quiet 28th after what seemed to be an issue-free run.
- James Davison returned to Rick Ware Racing at Daytona and put together his most solid run to date, finishing a career-best 23rd.
Daytona 500 Results (Unofficial)
- Christopher Bell
- Joey Logano
- Denny Hamlin
- Kurt Busch
- Brad Keselowski
- Kevin Harvick
- A.J. Allmendinger
- Michael McDowell
- Ryan Preece
- Alex Bowman
- Chris Buescher
- Martin Truex Jr.
- Cole Custer
- Erik Jones
- Ryan Blaney
- Daniel Suarez
- Aric Almirola
- Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
- Ty Dillon
- Ryan Newman
- Chase Elliott
- Anthony Alfredo
- James Davison
- Justin Haley
- Cody Ware
- Bubba Wallace
- Garrett Smithley
- Scott Heckert
- Timmy Hill
- Kyle Larson
- Corey LaJoie
- Chase Briscoe
- William Byron
- Austin Dillon
- Kyle Busch
- Josh Bilicki
- Matt DiBenedetto
- Tyler Reddick
- Ross Chastain
- Quin Houff
Stage 1
- Chase Elliott
- Joey Logano
- Denny Hamlin
- Brad Keselowski
- Kurt Busch
- Kyle Larson
- Martin Truex Jr.
- Austin Dillon
- Kevin Harvick
- Chris Buescher
Stage 2
- Denny Hamlin
- Kurt Buch
- Joey Logano
- Christopher Bell
- Martin Truex Jr.
- Chase Elliott
- William Byron
- Cole Custer
- AJ Allmendinger
- Kyle Busch
