The championship hopes for Christopher Bell took a brutal hit not in the middle of a pack on the asphalt at Talladega Superspeedway, but right on the entrance to pit road on Sunday. During a green-flag pit stop on Lap 56 of the YellaWood 500, the driver of the No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota lost control of his machine, slamming into the inside wall and picking up heavy right-front damage.
That was only the beginning of the nightmare for the team. Bell managed to drag his wounded No. 20 Toyota into the pits for repairs, but after heading back out on track, a flat tire forced him right back in, dropping him multiple laps behind the leaders. To make matters worse, a penalty for having too many crew members over the wall compounded the trouble during that tire stop.
The mechanical agony continued when a second right-front tire went down on Lap 67, demanding yet another unscheduled visit to pit road for the struggling car.
This disastrous sequence of events carries massive consequences for the Chase presented by Mobil 1. Bell arrived at Talladega sitting second in the championship standings, trailing Chase leader Kyle Larson by just five markers after pocketing a 46-point gain over him at Phoenix Raceway the weekend before. With the chaos at Talladega unfolding, only two Chase races are left on the calendar: Martinsville Speedway on Nov. 1 and Homestead-Miami Speedway on Nov. 8.
