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 before half-distance at Fontana with an engine failure.
After a 10th-place finish at Las Vegas – on a weekend where the Toyota driver did win the pole – he spun out at Phoenix and finished a disappointing 26th. That left the 27-year-old languishing 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 one of the quartet who has won more than one playoff race this season.
While 2017 Truck Series champion Bell and his #20 JGR 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. Crew chief Adam Stevens recalls that Bell was “distraught and concerned” by his tough start to the season.
“I’m like, ‘Dude, I do not know what you’re worried about,” he said. “We have the performance, and the capability is right there, you’re just having trouble seeing it’.”
Stevens said he was confident Bell and the No. 20 “weren’t that far off” from the teams running up front each week and “didn’t suffer for performance” as it struggled for results.
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 was third at Circuit of the Americas, led 63 laps and ended up sixth at Richmond, 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.
Bell ended that doubt with a win at New Hampshire in July, running down 2020 series champion Elliott for the lead with 41 of 301 laps to go and holding on for the victory. Finally crashing Victory Lane seemed to provide come concrete evidence Bell 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 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, Kansas and Bristol) but, 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.
It got much harder in the second round as he wrecked out of the Texas race and finished a disappointing 17th at Talladega. That put him in danger of elimination at the Charlotte Roval, needing a win to advance. But that’s exactly what he did.
Thanks to a timely pit call for four new tyres on the next-to-last caution, Bell barrelled through the field, passed leader Kevin Harvick on the start of overtime and claimed the victory and automatic advancement to the semi-final round.
“The round of 12 was extremely disheartening because I felt like the (semi-final) 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 semi-final 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 did little to improve his points position entering the final elimination race this past Sunday at Martinsville. Once again, he needed a win to advance. And once again, he delivered.
Bell pitted for new tyres on the final caution and lined up sixth on the restart with 24 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 but was eliminated by Chastain's do-or-die move on the final lap at Martinsville.
Upon closer look, it’s easy to see that Bell and his #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.
“[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.”
