{"id":50320,"date":"2025-03-11T21:48:46","date_gmt":"2025-03-12T02:48:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/racedaysa.com\/?p=50320"},"modified":"2025-03-12T21:53:03","modified_gmt":"2025-03-13T02:53:03","slug":"history-beckons-bell-aims-to-match-elliotts-record-at-vegas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/2025\/03\/11\/history-beckons-bell-aims-to-match-elliotts-record-at-vegas\/","title":{"rendered":"History Beckons: Bell aims to match Elliott’s record at Vegas"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Holly Cain, NASCAR Wire Service<\/em><\/p>\n

PHOENIX \u2014 From Christopher Bell\u2019s remarkable third consecutive win of 2025 to the successful season debut of the option tire and a historic start for Katherine Legge\u2014who became only the eighth woman to compete in NASCAR\u2019s top level in more than 50 years\u2014last weekend\u2019s NASCAR Cup Series race at Phoenix Raceway was a pivotal early-season highlight.<\/p>\n

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Christopher Bell, driver of the #20 Reser’s Fine Foods Toyota, poses with the winner sticker on his car in victory lane after winning the NASCAR Cup Series Shriners Children’s 500 at Phoenix Raceway on March 09, 2025 in Avondale, Arizona. (Photo by Chris Graythen\/Getty Images)<\/p><\/div>\n

And the reviews are positive.<\/p>\n

Bell, driver of the No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota, heads to Las Vegas Motor Speedway for the season\u2019s 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\u2019s superspeedway-style oval, Austin\u2019s Circuit of The Americas road course, and Phoenix\u2019s one-mile oval. The series will return to Phoenix on Nov. 2 for the season championship race.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“It took a while to get here, but we finally did it,” Bell said of his team\u2019s current pace. “I\u2019m just so proud. I\u2019m so proud of all the mechanics, the engineers, [crew chief] Adam Stevens, the pit crew members\u2014everybody 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.<\/p>\n

“This is what I knew would come out of this team. Like I say, it came from Adam. I didn\u2019t know what was capable of this team. Adam knew what was capable of this team. We\u2019re finally starting to see the fruit of it.”<\/p>\n

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Christopher Bell, driver of the #20 Reser’s Fine Foods Toyota, drives during the NASCAR Cup Series Shriners Children’s 500 at Phoenix Raceway on March 09, 2025 in Avondale, Arizona. (Photo by Jonathan Bachman\/Getty Images)<\/p><\/div>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Bell\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith us having multiple wins and knowing that we\u2019re in the playoffs, if there\u2019s a little bit more risky move, yeah, it certainly opens up the strategy book,\u201d Bell said. \u201cYou don\u2019t really know how it\u2019s going to play out until you get into the race, but certainly, the positions where it\u2019s a little bit more high-risk, where you normally wouldn\u2019t take that risk if you\u2019re focused on the regular-season points\u2014well, now we can.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s win.<\/p>\n

Larson, the defending winner of this spring\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n

First, however, they all must stop Bell, who is on a career-defining run.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is incredibly special,\u201d Bell said of the chance to tie Elliott\u2019s record and match a four-race win streak last accomplished by seven-time champion Jimmie Johnson in 2007. \u201cTo know that I have that opportunity ahead of me. We\u2019re going to a darn good place for it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis 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\u2019s hard to do. I acknowledge that. I\u2019m just kind of in disbelief that I have that opportunity, but I\u2019m looking forward to it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Holly Cain, NASCAR Wire Service PHOENIX \u2014 From Christopher Bell\u2019s remarkable third consecutive win of 2025 to the successful season debut of the option tire and a historic start for Katherine Legge\u2014who became only the eighth woman to compete in NASCAR\u2019s top level in more than 50 years\u2014last weekend\u2019s NASCAR Cup Series race at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":676,"featured_media":50269,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[451,67],"class_list":["post-50320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nascar","tag-christopher-bell","tag-las-vegas-motor-speedway"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/racedaysa.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/GettyImages-2204225506-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7hzTZ-d5C","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/676"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50320"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50320\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50321,"href":"https:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50320\/revisions\/50321"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racedaysa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}