While racing the rain, hungry underdogs, and daylight with uncharted waters, Christopher Bell stayed calm during a late-race overtime restart.
Bell stayed level-headed, holding off charges from Stewart-Haas teammates Josh Berry and Chase Briscoe, to sweep the weekend at New Hampshire Motor Speedway on Sunday, and collected his series-tying third win of the season.
The Norman, Okla. native swept the weekend after winning his fourth straight Xfinity Series race at New Hampshire in four starts on Saturday.
Drivers and teams were faced with coordinating setups off of past notebooks and blatant judgment due to lack of practice in a weather-filled weekend. However, Bell was able to build his driver’s mental notebook, not just from his prior success at the one-mile track, but from running the Xfinity race on rain tires Saturday.
“You never know how these things are going to shake out, whenever you change so many things. I personally love the adverse conditions because you’re always trying to think outside the box,” said Bell, who led 149 laps.
“When we went back out, I was feeling [the track] out, and it felt like the normal Loudon groove was really slippery. So I tried to run down or up.”
This was in light of NASCAR’s audible call to wait out a two-hour and 15-minute delay after rain hit the track with 82 laps to go. Instead of forgoing the remaining laps in the final stage, NASCAR gave fans at the track and drivers, not named Tyler Reddick who was leading at the time, what they wanted: to finish the race and utilize Goodyear’s rain treaded tires.
As the race wound down, Bell had to fight off multiple charges and attempts from drivers, after aggression took over, looking to capitalize on the wet-surface conditions.
The rain tires ran in today’s race were the second time drivers and teams saw the product on a points-paying track. A lobster-filled platter of edgy racing and questions arose, as only the 2023 All-Star weekend at North Wilkesboro and Richmond earlier this year have only used these tires prior.
“I thought it was really good, we could’ve started with the track a little bit wetter. The beginning was really fun, we were all over the place five wide at times, slipping and sliding around,” said Chase Briscoe who finished second, and now sits 25 points below the playoff cutline.
“It was really encouraging to see the wet weather progression of how aggressive we’ve been with it,” he said. “We can keep doing that. Even from the visibility standpoint, it was fine, even with no wipers and things like that. We can do more rain racing on the ovals and even the road courses, hopefully, we can get some more of it.”
That’s where credit has to be given to NASCAR. Time and time again, we’ve seen them call races when rain happens. Today, officials stuck it out, running the full distance and even a little bit of overtime, when needed.
NASCAR took the criticism after the Coke 600 was called for substantial humidity in the track drying process. Four weeks later, that excuse and reasoning wasn’t used to shorten today’s London event.
Goodyear and Cup Series directors have been working on a wet-weather tire for years, and after uncertainty during the delay on whether or not they’d be used, they were. Meaning as a fan, driver, or team, there’s little to complain about today—rain happened, the delay ended, the race resumed, and went the distance.
It’s rare we see New Hampshire hold five wide races, which was an extension of the already chaos-filled dry race. The late action was due to the wet-weather tires, and NASCAR deserves credit, for giving the fans a finish who paid to see a full show, and not cutting everyone short as they’ve done previously.
However, a tiny room for improvement moving forward is NASCAR should allow the teams to make decisions on what tires to put on in those wet conditions.
“We wanted to get our race started on time and to get our races back to green as quickly as possible if we have a delay,” said senior vice president of competition, Elton Sawyer, speaking of the wet weather tire vision.
“Kudos to Goodyear. This was Jim France’s vision. Our fans that bought a ticket got to see the full exciting finish.”
“We’re still learning through this process, we’d like to be out of the tire business, we’d like to turn that over to the teams. Eventually, we will get there, but do it in the safest way possible,” Sawyer said.
Sawyer said the race would’ve been done if not for the wet-weather tires.
“We would’ve been done with 82 laps to go. It gave us an opportunity to go green, we were going against daylight, Kudos to our teams, drivers, our owners, and especially Mr. France for his vision.”
This opened opportunities for underdogs, SHR’s Josh Berry, who’s auditioning for a ride in 2025 finished third, Legacy M.C.’s John Hunter Nemechek slotted in eighth, with uncertainty around his future SHR’s Ryan Preece in 11th, Front Row’s Todd Gilliland placed 12th, Harrison Burton collected 14th, rookie Carson Hocevar finished in 17th and on a part-time schedule, running a lap down most of the day, Kaulig Racing’s Ty Dillon came home 20th.
Additionally, Bell picked up his seventh New Hampshire win, in 11 national series races in NASCAR, with four in Xfinity, and now three in Cup. Kyle Larson also regained the regular-season points lead.
The Cup Series presses onto Nashville with just eight races left in the regular season. Coverage of the Ally 400 in Music City begins at 3:30 pm EST on NBC, the Performance Racing Network, and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, channel 90.
Note: Joe Gibbs Racing announced a news conference Tuesday afternoon for a new driver of the #19 car, after 2017 Cup Champion Martin Truex Jr. announced his retirement on June 14. After Christopher Bell accidentally leaked the potential decision in a media conference on Friday, the expected choice is to be Stewart-Haas’ Chase Briscoe.
The Slow Restart 