If Christopher Bell wasn’t awake on Lap 147 of Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Michigan International Speedway, he was certainly awake on Lap 148.
Bell and Chase Elliott were involved in a vicious crash in turn 3 that knocked both drivers out of the race, though they both climbed from their cars under their own power. Elliott was unharmed, while Bell suffered a fractured wrist but will still race at Pocono on June 14.
According to NASCAR, Bell’s impact to the outside wall was the hardest in the Next-Gen era (2022-present) and the hardest hit in a NASCAR race since 2015.
How hard was Christopher Bell’s hit?
“Delta-v is the measure of speed lost in an incident,” said Mike Ford, NASCAR VP of racing communications, per NASCAR.com. “So if you’re going 200 mph and then all of a sudden you come to a stop because you hit a wall and scrub off X amount of speed, that difference is what the Delta-v is. I can’t give out the Delta-v number for Bell. That data is proprietary in a way.
“We share that with the team and the driver, and that’s their data to do with what they want. But we can confirm that it was the largest number we’ve seen in the Next Gen era.”