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Christopher Bell said he has nothing to lose heading into Sunday’s Xfinity 500 at Martinsville Speedway, and plans to race for every stage and race win he can get in the last two races.
Bell is third in the Chase standings, 74 points behind Kyle Larson, after a 35th-place finish at Talladega Superspeedway.
Bell: ‘Throwing Hail Marys’
“Where we’re at now, we know the only way forward is to go out here and win two stages and a race, then go to Homestead and win two stages and a race,” Bell said. “In reality, we have nothing to lose. So now the pressure is off. It’s just a matter of going out there and throwing Hail Marys. We’re at that point now, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
What went wrong at Talladega
Bell started the Talladega race second in points. He spun entering pit road under green on Lap 56 and hit the inside wall, then had a flat tire, another tire failure and a penalty for too many crew members over the wall.
He said he did not have enough front brake bias, and the rear tires locked when he hit the brakes. He said nobody knew where to brake on pit road with the superspeedway package because there had been no green-flag pit stops to learn from.
“Nobody in the field had any data on where the car needed to be, where your brake marks needed to be or anything like that. It was a guessing game for all of us,” Bell said.
He said nobody on the No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing team blamed anyone else afterward.
“We all were accountable,” Bell said. “We all pulled the rope in the same direction. Nobody was pointing fingers and saying, ‘This is on you. This is on you.’”
Watching the bumpers
Even racing for wins, Bell said he has to be careful with NASCAR’s short-track bumper changes, which took out the energy-absorbing foam and make contact more likely to damage a car. He said he asked his spotter to remind him about it during the race, especially on restarts where cars stack up.
“Making sure you’re mindful of that is going to be mission-critical. So yeah, it’s going to be a talking point for sure,” Bell said.
What’s next
Bell starts 14th in Sunday’s race, as Pit This Time reported. He won the fall Martinsville race in 2022 and finished seventh in both of the last two races there. The Xfinity 500 starts at 2 p.m. ET on NBC, and the season ends November 8 at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
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