One of the storyline-talking points over the past week is how Christopher Bell, winner of three races in a row and three of the first four, still trails Daytona 500 winner William Byron for the overall NASCAR Cup Series championship standings by 13 points.
There are two ways of looking at it.
For one, Byron has simply had more consistency baked into his admittedly small body of work through the first month. After winning the Great American Race, Byron finished 27th at Atlanta but also scored 15 stage points after running top-5 for the entirety of the race.
Byron then finished second and sixth the next two weeks with 22 stage points over those two races. Simply put, Byron has raced inside the top-5 for the entirety of the season thus far and has been rewarded for it.
Bell doesn’t quite have as many stage points, and despite nearly winning the Daytona 500 himself, was crashed out of that race while leading his line and finished 31st. That’s the difference, not that it bothers Bell at all.
“I’ve had a couple people ask me that same question throughout the week and I genuinely think that the points format is really cool the way that it is because it rewards running well throughout the entire race,” Bell said. “I’ve gotten great finishes and won the races, but at Atlanta, I led one lap, and at COTA, I led nine laps. … Byron has scored more stage points than me.
“I’m content with the point system and understand the reason why I’m not leading the points is because I haven’t scored stage points. I think it will sort itself out once we get more races into the regular season, where the cream will rise to the top and the guys who score the most points will be at the front.”
There’s another way of looking at it too — Bell is actually leading the standings that actually matter in the form of playoff points.
Bell already has 16 playoff points, thanks to three wins and one stage victory, and those are how drivers get seeded at the start of the playoffs. The number of playoff points earned are added to the base total of points at the start of each round so that season long success dictates an advantage in each round.
Each win counts towards five playoff points. Stage wins also pay a playoff point. Finishing inside the top-10 of the regular season championship standings pays playoff points — 15, 10, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 respectively down the running order.
Byron currently has just six playoff points for winning Daytona and winning a stage at Phoenix. This is also what encourages drivers to compete for that regular season championship, too. Winning that amounts to the same as winning three races, where second in the standings is equivalent to winning two.
“Certainly, after race 26, the regular season points championship is one of the goals we’ve had the last couple of years, and we have fallen short,” Bell said. “I have never won the regular season championship – but that is definitely a goal. The 15 points are a really big deal. A really big advantage once you get into the post season, so I’m not really concerned with leading the points right now, but definitely once we get to race 24, 25, 26 – at the end of the regular season – that is a huge carrot to chase, and I will be chasing it.”
For now, the carrot Bell is chasing is winning four consecutive races, last accomplished in 2007 by Jimmie Johnson. Bell says Johnson, who owns a fellow Toyota team in Legacy Motor Club, has been in communication every step of the way this spring.
“It is still the coolest thing in the world to me that I have Jimmie Johnson in my phone,” Bell said. “He has talked to me – he has sent me a text message after every win so far. I’m still shocked every time I see his name pop up. I respect the heck out of him. It’s an honor to know that he thinks of me after the race to send a text message. That is so cool. We have connected, yes.”
Bell will try to match Johnson on Sunday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway where he has four top-10s, including a pair of runner-up finishes, all inside of the NextGen era that began in 2022.
He called the past three wins, which came at Atlanta, Circuit of the Americas and Phoenix, ‘special,’ which he recognizes is ‘cliché’ but struggles to articulate it in any other way.
“It’s crazy to think about,” Bell said. “Just the time I’ve been in the Cup Series, it feels like a long time, but then you look at stuff like that, and I’m still pretty young in my career.”
To his point, this is his sixth season at the highest level but Bell has very quickly established himself as one of the top contenders over that time and is now doing things most recently accomplished by the likes of Johnson, Kevin Harvick and Kyle Busch.
“I’m just trying to soak it all in and enjoy the moment,” Bell said. “It’s a dream come true to be compared to or be in the same category with guys that I’m having a chance to tie their stats or going with their stats. I guess time will tell how it all turns out, but it’s definitely an honor – win or lose – to be in that conversation.”
