Christopher Bell owned his errors at Nashville
The Joe Gibbs Racing driver has learned to live with some mistakes that have cost him victories this season.
Christopher Bell is currently starring in a commercial campaign called “Every Mile Matters,” which begins with Mile 1 – a grassy jaunt for a 4-year-old wheeling a yard kart.
It’s the first entry in an exhaustive video library built by Bell’s family as he progressed through the racing ranks to the NASCAR Cup Series (and many of the highlights are included in recent Mobil 1 advertisements).
“They would video a lot of the races growing up, and we would review it like a film review,” he said. “They were pretty heavy on the recording for sure.”
Bell, 31, has been driving professionally for more than half his life, so he’s digested racing footage covering thousands of laps and hundreds of hours.
It’s hard to think of any that would have been more agonizing – and certainly none more public – than Bell dissecting the final 60 seconds of his runner-up finish at Nashville Superspeedway while on the set of Amazon Prime’s post-race show early Monday morning.
Before the tape even rolled, Bell admirably volunteered a blunt assessment of why he failed to end a victory drought that now stands at 21 races.
He blew it.
“It’s pretty simple: Just disappointment,” he said. “I’ve got nobody, nothing, no circumstances to blame except myself. I just didn’t win the race. That’s it. That’s all there is to it.”
Every mile matters, indeed.
And every move does, too.
That’s been the painful lesson for the Joe Gibbs Racing star through the first half of the 2026 season.
He could have been riding a two-race winning streak into Michigan International Speedway if he had been able to capitalize on late-race restarts
At Charlotte Motor Speedway, it was Daniel Suárez fending off Bell despite having older tires in the waning laps of the Coca-Cola 600.
At Nashville, it was Bell in the lead but unable to stay there under attack from Gibbs teammates Denny Hamlin and Chase Briscoe.
Bell offered detailed reasoning for the placement of his No. 20 Toyota on the final restart.
“I really felt like I was in a pretty good spot being on the outside,” he said. “Obviously, you wanted to get clear. But once I didn’t get clear, I felt I had the leveraged position being on the inside, and Denny kept getting more and more aggressive with running me up the race track, and that brought (Briscoe) in, and I thought that even when (Briscoe) got the big run off (Turn) 4 and got to me, it kind of looked like he was going to go with me and give me a shove.
“And I’m like, ‘Oh yes, I got it.’ But then he split to the outside.”
It’s hard to quibble with the choices, especially when predicated on the hope of Briscoe tucking in behind him – instead of hanging a right and leaving Bell stuck between his teammates and bereft of momentum.
Briscoe, though, is also winless this season and in a more precarious points position than Bell, who had no defense other than overdriving the corner and then watching Hamlin motor away on the bottom.
“Just lost the race,” Bell said. “We just got stalled out. I thought (Briscoe) was going with me. I knew I had to get it in the corner, or I thought I did. And I got it in the corner, and Denny got clear off of 2.
“So I didn’t win the race, man. There’s nothing to blame. I had the best car on the race track. We had the lead, I got a great push from Denny on the restart, and I didn’t win the race.”
It gets overlooked that, for as much as two-time champion Kyle Larson gets praised for his sometimes breathtaking candor, Bell (who has dirt racing roots in common) often can be just as refreshingly open and plainspoken. Witness his recent takedown of superspeedway racing.
He was as brutally honest about his own shortcomings at Nashville.
Mark Martin, the guest analyst on Prime and a NASCAR Hall of Famer who knows something about star-crossed luck and the big one getting away, tried to console Bell.
“It was circumstances,” Martin said with a tinge of wistfulness.
Bell politely pushed back.
“It wasn’t circumstances this time, Mark,” he said. “There’s a lot of circumstances that I’ve had this year, but this time it was nothing, buddy. It was on me. I appreciate that, though.”
Ooof.
Bell maintained a smile throughout the interview, and there are some things to be positive about.
He came into the season with a goal of being front more often, and the No. 20 has already led more laps (398) in 14 races than all of last season (282).
The team had winning cars at Texas and Kansas that were neutralized by contact with other drivers. If he hadn’t made mistakes (speeding in the pit, brushing the wall) at Bristol Motor Speedway, he might have been in Victory Lane two months ago.
“We’re doing what we need to be doing,” he said. “We’re bringing great cars to the track. I feel like I’m driving as good as I ever have been.”
Except for those lapses in restart execution.
But another bright side: The errors won’t prove as costly with the return of The Chase.
Bell has climbed from 11th to seventh in the points standings over the past two races. The regular-season title is out of reach, but there’s a very realistic shot of moving into the top five over the next 12 races before the Chase.
And then there’s the 10-race championship dash that seems to mesh with Bell’s late-season surges.
Last year, Bell scored the most points in the nine races leading up to the season finale. If he’s fifth in points or higher by the Chase, “then I think the championship dream is still alive.”
That makes Nashville a little easier to swallow.
“I’m bummed I didn’t reward my team with a win,” he said. “But with this new format, today is going to feel a lot better than what it would have last year. So it is what it is. We got some points. We’ll move on and try to win the next week.”
“We’re going to win. We’re going to win a lot of races. I might win next week or the week after, but I’m going to win one of them.”
It’ll be a film review he’ll enjoy watching.
Full throttle linkage
Some NASCAR.com reads to check out from the past week:
Holly Cain sizes up the regular-season title fight of Denny Hamlin vs. Tyler Reddick for Michigan.
Neil Paine on five Cup Series drivers who have been trending up and down since last month.
Why NASCAR officials knew nearly immediately that there would be no penalties in the Austin Dillon-Brad Keselowski incident at Nashville.
Zach Sturniolo on how Nashville got hot for NASCAR as brakes failed and tension spiked.
Dustin Albino on the backstory of Shane van Gisbergen’s career-best finish on an oval.