- Christopher Bell’s patience with the Superspeedway racing package has worn thin.
- He was leading, but package worked against him, and was swallowed up by the field.
- NASCAR is planning some changes based on Denny Hamlin’s suggestions.
Christopher Bell has not had a start to mirror last year, when he had bagged three wins by this point in the season, but he has managed to pocket three top-5 finishes and one top-10 to go alongside them.
Yet what has truly stuck in his craw of late is not the absence of wins or the run of finishes; it is the superspeedway package that has him at the end of his rope.
Last weekend at Talladega, drivers across the paddock were in lockstep that the race ranked among the worst superspeedway contests they had been a part of. Passing was off the table, the car carried a mountain of drag, and from the moment the racing got underway, it set off a chain reaction of carnage on track.
Bell was no exception, and he did not mince words when he sounded the alarm over the state of superspeedway racing, from the fuel-saving strategies that have taken root to everything that goes hand in hand with them.
“It’s atrocious. … It’s a complete joke,” Christopher Bell said of superspeedway racing.
Bell stands among a handful of drivers who have earned the sanctioning body’s and NASCAR executives’ ears, to the point that he was brought into the group on a committee last year tasked with hammering out a new format for the sport.
Taking the floor at Texas Motor Speedway on the eve of Sunday’s Cup race, Bell went further out on a limb than most of his peers would dare go on record. He said, “I was really looking forward to running the high horsepower package this year. I think that’s been a great success. And now it’s time to focus on the Speedway package. We desperately need change. We’ve needed change for a long time. So hopefully that is the last time that we race that Speedway package.”
Drilling down into the particulars of what has been eating at him, Bell pulled no punches. He added, “It’s literally a lottery race. I mean, it is atrocious. And now the strategy is so spelled out that it becomes all about fuel saving. We try and adjust the stage length so that, we’re not fuel saving. Well, you can’t pass.”
“It’s a joke”
“So it becomes all about shortening the last pit stop to as short as you can get it, which means you’re still saving fuel in stage two, even though that you can make it to the end after that last pit stop. And it’s a joke, it’s a complete joke, and I look forward to changes.”
Turning to his own race at Talladega, Bell broke out of the gates from P17 and worked his way to the front, taking the lead on Lap 71. He went on to lead a race-high 31 laps, but the fuel-saving strategies that have become par for the course pulled the rug out from under him, and he got swallowed up in the back of the pack in no time.
He salvaged a runner-up result in Stage 2 before getting swept up in a wreck on the final lap that sent him tumbling down to a 17th-place finish.
NASCAR steps up to the plate
NASCAR vice president of race communications Mike Forde confirmed that the Talladega race had generated enough feedback from across the industry to put the matter back on the table.
Changes reportedly under consideration include trimming the rear spoiler, a course of action put forward by Denny Hamlin, to reduce drag, or bolting on more underbody downforce to shore up performance outside the draft.
Neither option is a silver bullet, and NASCAR’s own position is that altering the race car without putting it through its paces first is a path fraught with risk.
Replicating the conditions of a superspeedway pack, the sanctioning body has noted, calls for at least 15 cars on track at the same time.
