AVONDALE, Ariz. — Nothing seemed to be going right when driver Christopher Bell and crew chief Adam Stevens began working together. They struggled to get the right setups, and the race results showed it.
That concerned Bell, who was still early in his NASCAR Cup Series career, but Stevens wasn’t worried. He had previously won a championship with Kyle Busch and could see that Bell had the goods to have a successful career after moving to Joe Gibbs Racing.
“I will never forget 2021, my first year with Adam Stevens, and me and Adam got off to a rocky start,” Bell said Sunday at Phoenix Raceway. “We were sitting in his office there at JGR, and he looked at me and said: ‘We can do this. I’ve won three straight sitting in these exact same two chairs,’ talking about him and Kyle Busch. And he said, ‘I know that we can do it.'”
Stevens was right.
Bell turned into one of the Cup Series’ best drivers, earning his first win at Daytona International Speedway’s road course in 2021. He had at least two victories each of the past four seasons and was one of the final four drivers eligible for the Cup Series title in the season finale in 2022 and 2023.
Bell and Stevens went through a bit of a dry spell after winning at New Hampshire Motor Speedway last June, but they have been nearly unstoppable at the start of this season, which is just a month old.
After contending in the season-opening Daytona 500 before getting wrecked late, Bell ended a 19-race winless streak at Atlanta Motor Speedway’s high-banked oval the following week, followed that with a victory on the road course at Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas, then ran his winning streak to three straight on the flat mile oval at Phoenix Raceway on Sunday.
That’s three wins on three different tracks, making Bell the first driver to win three straight races in the NextGen car, which debuted in 2022. He is first Cup Series driver to win three straight races since Kyle Larson in 2021 and just the fourth to win three times in the first four races (Kevin Harvick in 2018 had been the most recent).
“We had so many opportunities and did everything we needed to do, it just didn’t go our way,” Stevens said of the 2024 Cup Series playoffs. “And what we’ve seen this year, three out of four times, things are going our way.”
Stevens has been a big part of it.
A race car driver growing up in Ohio, Stevens got his first break in NASCAR as a designer at Petty Enterprises in 2002 and moved to Joe Gibbs Racing in 2005.
He got his first shot at being a crew chief for JGR’s No. 20 car in the second-tier Xfinity Series, driven primarily by Joey Logano in 2011. He teamed with Busch starting in 2015, and the pair had a successful run together, winning 19 Xfinity Series races and the 2015 Cup Series championship.
Stevens moved to the No. 20 car to become Bell’s crew chief in 2021, and after that rocky start, started racking up checkered flags.
“Adam and Christopher are a real pair,” team owner Joe Gibbs said. “Adam, obviously you can tell he has a gift as a crew chief. He’s done the final four about nine times, and so just appreciate them and how hard they work.”
The work has put them on the cusp of elite company.
With a win Sunday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Bell would become the first driver to win four straight races since Jimmie Johnson’s championship year in 2007. Bell would still have a long way to go to match Richard Petty’s all-time streak of 10 wins in a row, set in 1967, but being mentioned in the same breath as a seven-time Cup Series champion like Johnson is quite heady.
“That’s incredibly special to hear that and know that I have that opportunity ahead of me, and we’re going to a darn good place for it,” Bell said. “I’m kind of in disbelief that I have that opportunity and I’m looking forward to it.”
And with Stevens in his corner, Bell should have a good chance of pulling it off.