Bell ‘in shock’ after missing out on Charlotte Chase win by slimmest of margins

Christopher Bell was a man struggling to process what had just happened.

As he stood on pit road at Charlotte Motor Speedway, Bell wore shock, disappointment, and the slow realization of how close he'd come to a championship swing if he'd won. All those emotions played out on Bell’s face and in his body language as he tried to explain how he ended up a couple of feet short of beating Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Chase Briscoe in the Bank of America 400.

“I have no idea,” said Bell of catching Briscoe from over two seconds behind. “I don’t know what happened that he slowed down, but yeah, I got a lot closer than I thought I was going to.”

The final lap, the final chunk that Bell needed to take out of Briscoe’s lead, first came at Turns 1 and 2, running the middle of the racetrack as Briscoe remained committed to the top. It put Bell a few car lengths behind as they went down the backstretch. In the final two corners, Bell wrapped the bottom, with Briscoe still high, and pushed to a side-by-side battle for the charge off the corner.

Then, in the final six or so seconds before the checkered flag, the two made contact. Bell washed into Briscoe’s left-rear tire; Briscoe wiggled, Bell wiggled on a smaller scale, and then the drag race was on. The margin of victory was .029s.

“I think I’m just in shock right now,” Bell said. “I didn’t think it was going to end like that.”

Although the gloves were off on the final lap, and Bell and Briscoe are not teammates at that point from Bell’s point of view, there is a line on how much contact is acceptable. Once it happened, even though it was unexpected, Bell, still only moments from having lived it, only saw one other option to change the outcome.

“I just didn’t expect to get there, and when I got beside him, I thought I had stalled him, and then I kind of got out of shape,” Bell said. “I don’t know – I guess I should have stayed into him a little harder and tried to nose him to the line. I thought I stalled him enough that I could nose him to the line, and I didn’t.”

A missed opportunity at stealing a race win left 20 points on the table for Bell. Instead of being 31 points behind championship leader Kyle Larson, the gap is 51 with four races to go. Bell gained only four points over the weekend.

“Yeah, it’s useless,” Bell said.

Given what is on the line at this time of year, it was a good day, but not good enough.

“Yeah [it was], but it doesn’t do any good in the grand scheme of things,” said Bell. “I came in negative 55, and I’m leaving negative 51, so that ain’t going to do it.”