Christopher Bell aims to match Bill Elliott's scorching 1992 start
Yesterday at 03:42 PM
From Christopher Bell‘s remarkable third consecutive win of 2025 to the successful season debut of the option tire and a historic start for Katherine Legge—who became only the eighth woman to compete in NASCAR‘s top level in more than 50 years—last weekend‘s NASCAR Cup Series race at Phoenix Raceway was a pivotal early-season highlight.
And the reviews are positive.
Bell, driver of the No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota, heads to Las Vegas Motor Speedway for the season‘s first traditional 1.5-mile race Sunday at 3:30 p.m. ET (FS1, PRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). He arrives having earned wins at three different types of tracks: Atlanta‘s superspeedway-style oval, Austin‘s Circuit of The Americas road course, and Phoenix‘s one-mile oval. The series will return to Phoenix on Nov. 2 for the season championship race.
A win for Bell on Sunday would tie a longstanding modern-era record held by NASCAR Hall of Famer Bill Elliott, who won four of the first five races in the 1992 season.
“It took a while to get here, but we finally did it,” Bell said of his team‘s current pace. “I‘m just so proud. I‘m so proud of all the mechanics, the engineers, [crew chief] Adam Stevens, the pit crew members—everybody on this 20-car. What you’re seeing is everybody pulling the rope in the same direction, everybody doing their job to the best of their abilities.
“This is what I knew would come out of this team. Like I say, it came from Adam. I didn‘t know what was capable of this team. Adam knew what was capable of this team. We‘re finally starting to see the fruit of it.”
The bad news for competitors is that this pace shows no signs of slowing down. Bell has been strong at Las Vegas, with four top-10 finishes in the last six races, including three of the last four. In last year‘s fall race, he started from the pole and led a race-best 155 of the 267 laps, only to finish second by less than a second to eventual series champion Joey Logano.
Bell‘s three wins so far this season give him and the No. 20 team the opportunity to experiment and fine-tune their strategy at upcoming Playoff tracks such as Las Vegas. Bell is also on the verge of surpassing his career high of three wins in a season, a mark he set in both 2022 and 2024.
"With us having multiple wins and knowing that we‘re in the playoffs, if there‘s a little bit more risky move, yeah, it certainly opens up the strategy book," Bell said. "You don‘t really know how it‘s going to play out until you get into the race, but certainly, the positions where it‘s a little bit more high-risk, where you normally wouldn‘t take that risk if you‘re focused on the regular-season points—well, now we can."
The 1.5-mile Las Vegas track is the first of several venues on the schedule that are typical for the series. Several drivers, including reigning series champion Logano and 2021 season champion Kyle Larson, are still looking for their first win of the year. Both have been strong in the Next Gen car era.
Logano, still searching for his first top-10 finish of the year, has four wins at Las Vegas, with three victories in the last 10 races, including last October‘s win.
Larson, the defending winner of this spring‘s race, has three wins at the track in that same span. His Hendrick Motorsports team has won half of the last 10 races at Las Vegas, including the last three March races with Larson (2024), William Byron (2023), and Alex Bowman (2022).
First, however, they all must stop Bell, who is on a career-defining run.
"That is incredibly special," Bell said of the chance to tie Elliott‘s record and match a four-race win streak last accomplished by seven-time champion Jimmie Johnson in 2007. "To know that I have that opportunity ahead of me. We‘re going to a darn good place for it.
"This sport has become so incredibly tough with the parity that we have. The teams are so tight. The cars are really tight. The drivers are tight. Everybody performs at a high level. There are 10, 15 guys that could win on any given week. It was really cool to see. The field is littered with talented drivers, teams, crew chiefs. It‘s hard to do. I acknowledge that. I‘m just kind of in disbelief that I have that opportunity, but I‘m looking forward to it."
— NASCAR Wire Service
