It didn’t take long for Christopher Bell to figure out Bristol Motor Speedway’s dirt, though temporary, was ready made for drivers with experience on the slick surface.
And on Sunday night, the Tennessee short track was the perfect layout for Bell to earn the fifth win of his NASCAR Cup Series career.
“It was a very tough surface to get a hold of and should’ve rewarded guys that kind of knew what to expect and how to get the car around the race track,” Bell said, “which I think it did.”
He held on through a restart eight laps from the end to hold off a fellow Toyota driver — and another who grew up racing on dirt — in Tyler Reddick.
The 28-year-old Bell was a whiz-kid sensation on the surface growing up in Oklahoma, winning three Chili Bowl Nationals driving midget cars on dirt, and that experience helped drive his Joe Gibbs Racing No. 20 Camry to victory for the first time this season.
For the third year in a row, Bristol’s 0.533-mile bullring had dirt covering its concrete for NASCAR’s spring visit. In the first two editions of the race, the winners were Joey Logano (2021) and Kyle Busch (2022), who are both two-time Cup Series champions but have less expansive dirt experience than many of their colleagues.
Bell said race organizers this year figured out how to give the surface more of the feel of a true dirt track than ever before, and he obviously capitalized.
“This place is so much fun, whether it’s dirt or concrete,” Bell said.
Reddick, in his first season with 23XI Racing, was second on the Bristol dirt for a second straight season, followed by former Richard Childress Racing teammate Austin Dillon in a Chevrolet, JTG Daugherty Racing’s Ricky Stenhouse Jr. in another Chevy, and Stewart-Haas Racing’s Chase Briscoe in the highest-finishing Ford.
Bell’s last challenge came after Busch spun with 15 laps left. Bell took off on the restart and widened his lead over Reddick, who won the second stage. Reddick was closing in on the last lap when the 16th and final caution came out, instantly ending the race and sending Bell’s team into hysterics.
“Man, I just can’t get over how long those laps feel,” Bell said.
Reddick also enjoyed the intensity down the stretch.
“I thought I had a little bit more,” he said. “I was at the edge, but I wasn’t quite there in the last couple of laps.”
Kaulig Racing’s Justin Haley was sixth, with JGR’s Martin Truex Jr., Front Row Motorsports’ Todd Gilliland, SHR’s Kevin Harvick and JGR’s Ty Gibbs rounding out the top 10.
Season points leader Ross Chastain, who took the top spot after Hendrick Motorsports driver Alex Bowman’s car was hit with a 60-point penalty for violations from last weekend at Richmond Raceway, ended a lap down in 28th.
Hendrick’s Kyle Larson — like Bell, a dirt racing savant who continues to enter races on the surface outside of NASCAR — started in pole position and won the first stage. Larson took only fuel heading to the final segment, eschewing fresh tires, but spun on his own 96 laps from the end, had to pit and restarted at the back of the field.
Larson’s race ended for good some 20 laps later after bumping several times with SHR driver Ryan Preece between turn three all the way to turn one. Larson, coming off a win at Richmond, drove into the garage.
Preece was angered by earlier contact with Larson and gave him a hand gesture soon after to make that clear as their cars passed each other.
“I’m guessing he was paying me back for whatever I did earlier,” said Larson, who finished 35th. “He rode me straight into the fence.”
Busch scored a surprising win last spring at Bristol, cleaning up as he swept to the checkered flag after leaders Reddick and Briscoe slid out of contention. He lost his chance for a second straight win with his late spin and finished 32nd.
Logano, who won the Truck Series race at the track Saturday night, struggled to find his way and was behind the wall with the hood up on his Team Penske No. 22 Ford less than halfway through.
“It was an eventful face for the short amount of laps we got to run,” Logano said. “It seemed like every wreck in front of me, I got up in the middle of it.”
Logano thought he had a competitive car, but broke his steering on a hard hit, then “clobbered a fence after that.”
He wound up 37th — last place. It’s the second time that has happened to him this season, with the other last month in Las Vegas. Logano had only two last-place finishes in his NASCAR career before this year.
The Cup Series completes a three-race run on tracks shorter than a mile next Sunday at Virginia’s Martinsville Speedway.