Bell feels the sting after missing out on Phoenix victory

Christopher Bell had the best car in Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Phoenix Raceway, but he was reminded that the best car doesn’t always win.

Bell and the No. 20 team from Joe Gibbs Racing chased Ryan Blaney across the finish line. The final stint of the race was 12 laps off a restart, in which Bell had to charge from the seventh position. He made it to second place with seven laps to go, a second behind Blaney, but only closed to half a second by the finish.

“Yeah, ultimately, if we had more green flag laps, I think we could have made a run at him,” Bell said. “But I don’t know. You win some, you lose some, and this one stings, but on a positive side, I’m really proud of our entire team. The pit crew did amazing. Adam brought an amazing car. Our engineers and our mechanics did really well, and it’s something to build on.”

The defending winner of the spring event at Phoenix, it didn’t take long for Bell to pick up where he left off. Bell led eight different times for a total of 176 of 312 laps. He was in control by over three seconds on Blaney when the caution flew with 25 laps to go.

Stevens made the call for four tires on what was the final pit stop. It was a déjà vu call for a Joe Gibbs Racing teammate at Phoenix, as it turned out to be the wrong one. Denny Hamlin, Bell’s teammate, lost the championship in the fall on a four-tire call instead of taking two tires.

Bell left pit road in the eighth position and, through the choose rule, restarted seventh. The green came back out with 19 laps to go, but the caution quickly followed. It was the final caution of the afternoon, and it cut more laps off the scoreboard that Bell would have needed.

After the checkered flag, Stevens got on the team radio and acknowledged, “That was on me.”

Bell did not respond.

“I don’t know – it was a day that we needed,” Bell said. “We got a lot of stage points (and) finished second. Just bummed whenever they get away like that.”

Bell hauled in 54 points in Sunday’s race.

With finishes of 35th and 21st in the first two races of the season, Bell has been looking to take big steps forward one weekend at a time. He finished third at Circuit of the Americas to jump from 31st to 24th in the championship standings, and jumped all the way into the top 10, at sixth, with his second consecutive top-10 finish.