It seems virtually absurd now — as he sits on the verge of equaling two seven-time Cup champions — but Christopher Bell‘s ambition once nearly got the better of him.
It seems just as odd that someone blessed with one of the most cherubic faces in motorsports would be so antsy about his NASCAR career.
The rosy-cheeked Bell looks like he‘s 30 going on 13. His prodigious talent has cemented him on can‘t-miss prospect lists for years.
MORE: Phoenix results | Cup schedule
But midway through the 2019 season, Bell was a rising star with a 2017 Truck championship, a 2018 Xfinity title race appearance and an unshakable belief that he belonged in the Cup Series yesterday.
“I think the best way for me to win at the Cup level is to get there and start trying at it,” he told reporters during a national call on July 31, 2019. “Everyone is saying that they‘re moving guys up too quick, and the difference is that I‘m 23 years old. I‘m not 18, 19 or even 20 years old.
“I‘ve got a lot of racing experience, and right now I feel like I‘m in my prime as a race car driver. If the opportunity comes to go Cup racing next year, I definitely don‘t want to waste another year in my prime, so to speak, of not learning and not getting that experience of Cup racing.”
On its face, that bold statement could be taken as extremely confident but also a tad audacious and maybe a little selfish. The words landed hard in the upper levels of management at Joe Gibbs Racing and Toyota Racing Development, which subsequently counseled Bell to temper his opinions (especially when they could be viewed as unwittingly denigrating the ladder series).
Bell typically eschews headline-making bluster in favor of letting his results do the talking. He quickly clarified the remarks and holstered speculation about his future.
But during a post-race news conference Sunday after making history as the first with three consecutive victories in the Next Gen car, he candidly provided overdue context about why he was so anxious to reach the Cup Series five years ago.
“Whenever I got into full-time Trucks (in 2015), I was 21 years old,” Bell said in the Phoenix Raceway media center. “At that time Erik Jones was in the Cup Series, younger than me. Chase Elliott was in the Cup Series, younger than me. I was like, ‘Man, I have to get to the Cup Series tomorrow, otherwise I’m not going to make it.’ “
His sense of urgency has been vindicated. Bell was promoted from Xfinity for the 2020 season and then replaced Jones in JGR‘s No. 20 Toyota for 2021.
Since then in the Cup Series, Bell has 12 victories, two championship round berths and a very real chance he could become the first to win four in a row since Jimmie Johnson in 2007.
None of which would have seemed possible when he signed with Toyota in 2014 to run 15 Late Model races in hopes of making the difficult transition from dirt to asphalt.
“It‘s unbelievable to look back,” Bell said Sunday after becoming only the second driver in JGR‘s storied history to win three consecutive races. “It seemed like it was so far away to be here today in this moment. Looking back at it, it felt like it happened overnight.”
That perspective also was warped by the excellence of his current Cup peers. Many are younger than Bell, and that age gap heightened the tension.
By the end of Bell‘s rookie season in Cup, Chase Elliott was the 2020 champion, William Byron was a race winner, and a formerly unheralded driver from Norman, Oklahoma, who entered NASCAR with no stock-car pedigree understandably was freaked out about meeting expectations.
MORE: Christopher Bell through the years
He had been fretting since joining the driver development program at TRD, which literally invested tens of millions of dollars in his progression after executives David Wilson, Tyler Gibbs and Jack Irving saw that Bell was for real.
But there were irritating signs of self-doubt for their emerging phenom.
As Truck teammates at Kyle Busch Motorsports in 2016, Bell managed only one win to Byron‘s seven with future Cup crew chief Rudy Fugle. With Byron moving to the Xfinity Series in 2017, Bell pleaded with team owner Kyle Busch to match him with Fugle the next year. The pairing happened and he won a Truck title.
“(Byron) kicked my butt (in 2016),” Bell said. “He just outperformed me. I remember having a conversation with Kyle Busch in the fall of 2016 after Homestead. I said, ‘Kyle, I have to be paired with that team.’ I needed to prove to myself or learn if I can do this or not. If I can’t do this, I’m going to try and be a sprint car driver.
“Kyle, I think, had reservations of pairing me with Rudy Fugle for 2017. Thank God he did.”
Bell has done the rest, though. With each passing week, that 2019 proclamation of being an inevitable force in Cup seems much more prophetic than presumptuous.
This is the heady list of Cup drivers with four consecutive victories: Cale Yarborough, Darrell Waltrip, Dale Earnhardt, Harry Gant, Bill Elliott, Mark Martin, Jeff Gordon and Johnson.
Bell will be a heavy favorite to join them at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, where he dominated last year and has two pole positions and two runner-up finishes. And if he does win, it again would prove why he was right about reaching the big leagues as soon as humanly possible.
As it turned out, it was only a matter of time until the Christopher Bell Era began in the NASCAR Cup Series.
Why would he squander a second of such potential greatness?
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