Raised on small ovals, Christopher Bell is about to return to Road America, the site of his road racing breakthrough
Christopher Bell is a racer. That’s the standard compliment, right?
He understands racing through and through. He lives it. He breathes it. He makes his living in the sport but would feel the same about it if he didn’t get paid. Racing is on his mind when he goes to sleep and when he wakes up.
Sure, Bell is a short track, oval track guy at heart.
He made his name in midgets and drove sprint cars and super late models before getting to NASCAR. The quarter-miles and half-miles were his racing home.
But first and foremost, he is a racer.
So if someone tells Bell the next track is several miles long, it has a bunch of right turns and he runs the risk of developing a repetitive stress injury from shifting, it might take some time, but he’ll figure it out. He might even come to enjoy it.
The 26-year-old Bell has reached that point in his relationship with NASCAR road races.
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When the NASCAR Cup Series rolls into Elkhart Lake’s Road America this week, Bell will be returning to the track where he collected his first road course victory two years ago in the Xfinity Series. He’ll be looking for the second win of his Cup career, having picked up his first in February at Daytona International Speedway, not on the oval but on the road course.
“I think if you’d have told me my first Cup win was going to come on a road course, I would have called you crazy,” Bell said. “But last year the road racing stuff was pretty good for me, and really the last couple of years. It’s been fun to learn and get better at it, and now it’s gotten to the point I do enjoy it.”
The Jockey Made in America 250, set for 1:30 p.m. Sunday, will be the first race for NASCAR’s premier series in Wisconsin in 65 years. Road America, the rolling, 4-mile course in rural Sheboyan County, was the site of that Aug. 12, 1956, Grand National race won by Tim Flock and has hosted the Xfinity Series annually since 2010.
Bell wouldn’t be in the first group of names when it’s time to pick a winner – Chase Elliott, Kyle Larson, Martin Truex Jr. and Bell’s teammate Kyle Busch come to mind most quickly – but he’d like that to change. Maybe this weekend. Definitely before long.
“I do enjoy the challenge of racing the racetrack,” said Bell, who has improved through repetition, with no special instruction and no inordinate amount of time on the simulator. “The corners are different on road courses, and it’s just a fun challenge and something I’ve come to enjoy because of the difficulty in it.
“I want to be able to get to the point where I have no weaknesses, where every week when we go to the racetrack, my team, my mechanics, my engineer, my crew chief, they believe we can compete for the win, whether that’s at a road course, an oval, a short track, an intermediate, a dirt track … whatever it is.”
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Bell joined Keith Kunz’s USAC team in 2013, after Larson moved to NASCAR, and won the national midget championship. Then he added sprint car and super late model victories to his résumé and won the prestigious Chili Bowl Midget Nationals in 2017, ’18 and 19.
Bell made his NASCAR debut in 2015 in the truck series, driving for Kyle Busch Motorsports and Toyota, and picked up his first victory in his third start, on the dirt at Eldora Speedway in Ohio.
He won five truck races in 2017 before moving up to Xfinity with Toyota’s flagship team, Joe Gibbs Racing, for which he won seven times in 2018 and eight in 2019.
Placed with Leavine Family Racing, then a Gibbs satellite organization, Bell finished 20th in Cup Series points with a pair of top-five finishes as a rookie last year. He heads to Road America 16th in the standings.
“The fact that I’m (55) races into my Cup career now and I have a road course win is really cool,” Bell said. “I’ve got obviously a lot of short track and oval wins throughout my NASCAR career on the different levels. So we know that we can win on ovals (in Cup) if everything comes together now, but we haven’t done it yet. I feel like I’m gaining on it and just got to be more consistent.
“The last two months we’ve really been off a little bit and (have) focused on getting back to where we can contend again. Going to Road America should be a place where we can contend for the win. I’ve run well there in the past, I’ve won there in the past, so there’s no reason we shouldn’t run good.”
Bell qualified fourth at Road America in 2017, when he ran a partial Xfinity schedule, and fifth in 2018. He started 12th and led 10 of the 45 laps in his 2019 victory.
In the Cup Series, outside of the Daytona win, Bell has had less stellar success with road racing. His next-best finish has been 12th on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway infield course last year. This season he crashed at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas, and finished 24th at Sonoma Raceway in California.
Although getting that first Cup victory was a boost for Bell, it has made the season since more frustrating.
“It probably gave us … I don’t want to say false confidence, but it definitely gave us high expectations,” Bell said. “We didn’t have that race circled to win. And the fact that we did go out there and win that race, we thought we were going to contend for a lot more wins this year.
“Unfortunately it hasn’t happened yet, but I do think there’s no reason why we can’t win more in the future.”
Spoken like a true racer.