NASCAR on TV this week
#20: Christopher Bell, Joe Gibbs Racing, Mobil 1 Toyota Camry

NASCAR Championship 4 Chaos: What We Know About Martinsville Finish, Potential Race Manipulation

by

What was an incredible race and playoff battle at Martinsville Speedway — arguably the best race at the track in the NASCAR Cup Series’ Next Gen car — will instead be remembered for all the wrong reasons.

With Christopher Bell and William Byron separated by one point for the final playoff spot in the Championship 4, shenanigans ensued between both drivers and manufacturers. Byron was running in sixth and quickly losing ground to the top five in the closing laps of the race, but the Chevrolets of Ross Chastain and Austin Dillon ran two-wide behind him, forming a barrier against the rest of the field that kept Byron in sixth.

Bell, who was one lap down to the field in 19th, was going to be out by one point until Bubba Wallace slowed dramatically in the final three laps, which allowed Bell to pass him to make the pass in turn 3. But the No. 20 car missed the corner and had to ride the wall out of turn 4 to take the checkered flag.

Bell had stayed in front of the No. 23 car to clinch the last Championship 4 spot on a tiebreaker, but after an anxious 20 minutes of waiting, NASCAR elected to penalize Bell with a safety violation for riding the wall on the final lap. The penalty dropped Bell four spots (the last car one lap down), and Byron instead joined Joey Logano, Tyler Reddick and Ryan Blaney as the last member of the Championship 4.

At least for now.

Christopher Bell’s Wall Ride & Bubba Wallace’s Slowdown

When interviewed after the race for how he lost all that ground, Wallace explained that he had a mechanical failure that caused him to fall off the pace in the final laps.

“I went loose and something broke, so I was just nursing it,” Wallace said. “… Just trying to bide our time and not crash and bring out a caution and jumble up the whole field. That was it.”

Indeed, Wallace’s final lap was 24.891 seconds, more than three seconds slower than the final lap for the top five finishers. Seventeen of the first 20 cars to take the checkered flag ran a lap faster than 22 seconds, while Bell’s last lap after missing the corner and riding the wall out of turn 4 was 22.506 seconds.

But the slow lap time did not play in Bell’s favor for the decision handed out by NASCAR, and he was eliminated from the playoffs despite posting the best average finish of every driver in the postseason.

“I made a mistake and I slid into the wall,” Bell said. “And unfortunately, they ruled that as a safety violation. … I don’t know what to say. I didn’t advance my position into the wall; I lost time on the racetrack. It’s not meant to be. It’s fine.”

He was surprised that a penalty was even a topic of conversation.

“I didn’t think I was going to get penalized at all,” Bell said. “I didn’t even think a penalty was in the cards.”

When asked if the penalty was unfair, Bell said, “I’m going to keep my mouth shut.”

Byron, as expected, expressed pleasure with NASCAR’s ruling.

“Thankful NASCAR looked at it, that they have rules in place, and that’s what it is,” Byron said.

“… I have a hard time feeling happy in this situation, but we raced as hard as we could. We raced within the rules and everything like that. It is what it is at that point, we were tied on points, and like I said, the wall ride is what it is. Just had to fight through that, and glad to race for a championship for sure.

In the decision to penalize Bell, NASCAR’s Senior Vice President of Competition Elton Sawyer used the ruling put in place after Chastain’s famous Hail Melon at Martinsville to make the Championship 4 two years ago as the reasoning for handing out a penalty to the No. 20 team.

“Obviously we look at all the video, and as I back up on that and you go back two years ago when we had the situation with Ross here, we went to Phoenix [and] there was a lot of dialogue with the drivers that that’s not a move that we want to have to make on the last lap,” Sawyer said.

“… There was language in the rule book, and when you look at it today, [Bell] clearly got up against the fence there in 3 and 4 and rode the fence all the way, all four there, and that’s strictly to protect our drivers as well as our fans.

“So yeah, that [call] was pretty straightforward.”

Ross Chastain & Austin Dillon’s Radio Communications, Battle with William Byron

While NASCAR did not make a ruling on Byron, Chastain and Dillon, the fact that the latter two drivers did not pass Byron raised some eyebrows with how far the No. 24 car had fallen off the pace.

Those eyebrows were raised even more after the NBC broadcast played radio communications from Dillon’s team that showed they were aware of Byron’s points situation, and that he would be out of the playoffs if Dillon had attempted to pass him.

Furthermore, Dillon’s team wondered over the radio if Chastain’s team also knew Byron’s situation, to which someone on the No. 3 team replied, “he should.”

And sure enough, Dillon and Chastain had run side-by-side with each other for the final three minutes of the race, never in a position to pass Byron, who ended the race nearly a full straightaway behind the car ahead of him.

Bell was none too happy with the developments toward the front of the pack.

“It was clear what was going on,” Bell said. “The No. 24 came back to me probably a straightaway or something.”

When asked about the Nos. 1 and 3 cars racing side-by-side behind him at the end of the race, Byron insisted that they raced hard and that they never laid off to avoid passing him.

“No one moved me, and they gave me room to catch my car and didn’t move me,” Byron said. “They raced me hard, and I just didn’t have a lot of rear tires left. I needed all of the racetrack, and I was using all of it.

“… They never moved me but they were racing hard. They’re still getting in the corner hard and they’re not lifting down the straightaway, [leaving a] big margin to get back to somebody like the No. 23 did. It’s hard racing, and we’re all at the limit.”

When asked about Dillon and Chastain racing side-by-side behind Byron, the radio communications from Dillon’s team and Wallace falling off the pace at the end of the race, Sawyer said that race control did not review those incidents and had only taken a closer look at Bell’s wall ride.

“If you look at the other situations that were going [on], the [No.] 23 and the cars behind the [No.] 24, [they] really had no bearing at this time,” Sawyer said. “We’ll look at those at a later time.”

Now the question turns to what happens once NASCAR reviews those incidents. Do Wallace, Dillon and Chastain or their teams receive penalties if it’s determined they had intentionally lagged back at the end of the race? Does Byron receive a penalty? Is the Championship 4 truly set in stone?

We’ll find out sometime this week.

NASCAR Content Director at Frontstretch

Stephen Stumpf is the NASCAR Content Director for Frontstretch and is a three-year veteran of the site. His weekly column is “Stat Sheet,” and he formerly wrote "4 Burning Questions" for three years. He also writes commentaries, contributes to podcasts, edits articles and is frequently at the track for on-site coverage.

Find Stephen on Twitter @stephen_stumpf

26 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments