MIAMI BEACH, Fla. – At the start of the season, NASCAR Camping World Truck Series rookie driver Christopher Bell may have been his own worst enemy.
Bell, a talented open-wheel driver moving from a seven-race schedule to a full championship season, driving for the reigning NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion Kyle Busch and filling the void of Erik Jones who took the truck title last season was a lot to embrace and digest.
The Norman, Oklahoma native started the season on his roof in a barrel-roll last lap wreck at Daytona International Speedway.
A week later, Bell seemed poised to win his first career Truck race at Atlanta Motor Speedway, but controversy involving a late-race crash and blowing a tire while leading six laps from the finish left a sour 26th place finish in their mouth.
Things weren’t much better a month later at Martinsville, where Bell finished 19th and left the historic short track 21st deep in the championship standings.
A stretch of three races at Kansas, Dover and Charlotte re-ignited Bell’s flame with three consecutive top-10 finishes heading to Texas Motor Speedway in June.
Missing the shift at the start of the race blew Bell’s engine before he could complete one lap – erasing any previous moment the Jerry Baxter-led team had.
Bell admitted during Thursday’s Championship 4 media availability Thursday in Miami that at that point he had gotten down in himself as a driver and his team was trying to recover from a slump.
“At the beginning of the year, we were really fast, but it wasn’t falling together,” said Bell. “I was making mistakes. We were just getting caught up in wrecks and then I got down in myself.”
One of those that saw a change in his driver’s demeanor was team owner Busch.
With not even a quarter of the season complete, Busch sat his driver down and gave him a much-needed reassurance boost and some advice that has now carried Bell to Homestead with an opportunity to bring Kyle Busch Motorsports back-to-back truck championships.
“Our team kinda fell into a hole – got into a slump where we were like man, we can’t do anything right,” Bell added. Jerry (Baxter, crew chief) was kind of down. I was down. Kyle just sat me down. He said, Look, you’ve got great equipment. You’re a talented racecar driver. Jerry is a hell of a crew chief. Everything will come together. You just got to stop trying to make it come together.”
It was from that moment that Bell wasn’t going to worry about what happened. He wasn’t going to go to the track – do his job and whatever the cards dealt – he would live with it.
Success came right way.
“Once that finally — once I took that mentality to the racetrack, just said, whatever happens happens, I just was able to let it fall in place,” added Bell. “That’s wherever we went to Gateway, I took the lead. If I remember right, I could have got shoved up the racetrack. It didn’t even bother me. I just said, Okay, it’s not my day. The next lap later they wreck, I get the lead back.”
Hanging onto the lead and winning his second career Truck Series race, Bell stamped his way into the Chase and began an impressive streak of 12 top-10 finishes in the last 14 races – only hiccupped with a 24th at Michigan and 11th at Texas Motor Speedway two weeks ago.
Embracing change has paid off right to the championship round.
Bell will square off against seasoned veterans Matt Crafton, Timothy Peters and Johnny Sauter for the championship title in Friday night’s Ford EcoBoost 200 (8:00 p.m., FOX Sports 1 / MRN / SiriusXM) where he knows he’s the underdog, but he’s prepared to fight.
“Yeah, I do think I’m the underdog, just because I don’t think anybody really expected us to be here,” said Bell. “But after the start of the year, we were fast at the beginning of the year, then we kind of just didn’t go right where we didn’t finish races, then we were behind, kind of lost our speed there for a little bit.
“But now here we’re in the Chase, we’re in the thick of things. So, we made it this far. We’re going to have to make sure that we’re on our A game to be able to be able to pull this off.
“But I know Jerry Baxter, my crew chief, has been awesome at this racetrack, Homestead. So, I’m really looking forward to coming here and getting to race for a championship. It’s a dream come true.”
When push comes to shove and the engines are fired Friday night, Bell says his plan of attack doesn’t change.
“If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be. That’s the mentality we have going into Homestead.”
Follow Chris Knight on Twitter @Knighter01.
