RIDGEWAY, Va. — While his teammates’ cars were still being loaded into their Joe Gibbs Racing haulers, Christopher Bell parked his No. 20 Toyota near the front of the Martinsville Speedway pit road.
Climbing out, his face was beet red despite the cool weather and he was looking forlorn. He had finished seventh and was the only Toyota to place within the top 10 after the NASCAR Cup Series race on Sunday, Oct. 26.
Alas, it wasn’t enough. Bell missed the series’ Championship 4 by only seven points.
“I had track position at times, and I had tires at times, and I just wasn’t good enough,” Bell told reporters post-race.
While he won’t join his teammates Chase Briscoe and Denny Hamlin to fight for a championship at Phoenix Raceway, he at least finished the short-track event, unlike his counterparts.
Briscoe, who had already won the weekend prior at Talladega Superspeedway and locked himself into the title fight, was managing a decent running during the afternoon and hovered around the top 10.
But on lap 295, his engine began to expire, and he was forced to retire from the event.
“No indication,” Briscoe said. “I was just running around there. I felt really good about coming here and where we were at and racing with [Kyle] Larson there and went to upshift and something happened. I’m not really sure; it’s unfortunate. We’ll go on to next week, and that won’t matter anyways.”
But he was only the first.
In the next 39 laps, not one, but two Toyota machines followed him. Only 28 laps after Briscoe, Toyota pseudo-teammate Riley Herbst had his engine expire as well. He had only just limped his No. 35 Monster Energy car behind the wall when the next engine gremlin struck merely nine laps later with Hamlin.
Like Briscoe, Hamlin is already locked into the championship finale thanks to his win two weeks earlier at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. However, that doesn’t mean it stings any less.
“We were just starting to come around,” Hamlin told reporters in the Martinsville media center. “I felt like I gave the No. 12 the space there during that run to try to get them in the long run, and I felt like I was starting to come back to him.
“I like the outlook of kind of where we were at and how much better we got through the race, but obviously, no result.”
For Bell, however, his failure of the day was the failure to surpass playoff rival Larson in points. The No. 20 team entered the weekend in Virginia with a one-point lead over the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet. All he had to do was finish ahead of Larson to solidify his spot in the championship finale.
And it started off well. Bell had run in the top 10 for a vast majority of the day, earning stage points with an eighth-place finish in stage one and a third-place result in stage two.
However, the bad news for the Oklahoma native was that Larson had finished ahead of him in both segments, increasing his points lead. Even worse, fellow playoff drivers Ryan Blaney and William Byron were the clear fastest of the race, both leading a combined 481 laps during the day, and had a high chance of winning and knocking the JGR driver out of the playoffs.
“By the end of the runs, it was slick out there,” Bell said. “It seemed like [my tires] wore more than the others, and that was the difference maker.”
With an untimely caution during a green-flag pit stop cycle on lap 379, Bell was shuffled to 11th with only 111 laps to go. He spent the rest of the event trying to climb through the field and enduring two restarts to get within eyesight of the lead.
But with a final restart with only 11 laps to go, Bell’s JGR Toyota had nothing for the faster Team Penske and Hendrick Motorsports cars ahead of him.
“You try and tighten it up and it just hurts the beginning of the run and then whenever you loosen it up,” Bell continued. “I actually felt pretty good at the beginning, and I could keep pace and make a little bit of passes, and then it just really struggled at the end.”
Bell had to settle for seventh and, like in 2024, Martinsville saw the end of his playoff drive.
“I’d say it feels a lot better than last year, for sure,” Bell said. “I genuinely feel like that the [Championship 4] going there are very deserving. It is what it is.
“We knew coming in here, we were going to have to outrun the No. 5, and we didn’t do it.”
Dalton Hopkins began writing for Frontstretch in April 2021. Currently, he is the lead writer for the weekly Thinkin' Out Loud column, co-host of the Frontstretch Happy Hour podcast, and one of our lead reporters. Beforehand, he wrote for IMSA shortly after graduating from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in 2019. Simultaneously, he also serves as a Captain in the US Army.
Follow Dalton on Twitter @PitLaneCPT