Chase Briscoe, in his second season with JGR<\/a>, has 16 top 10s and finished sixth in his quest for a third consecutive Southern 500 trophy.<\/p>\nBell had endured a frustrating season, with seven second-place finishes and a wrist injury suffered in a crash at Michigan that he thought would derail his season. But with fresher tires after Larson stayed out on the track instead of changing to new tread, Bell quickly tracked down the defending NASCAR champion and broke through to victory lane for the first time this season.<\/p>\n
He also cut into Hamlin\u2019s Chase points lead, moving from 50 behind to just 12 as the series heads to World Wide Technology Raceway in Madison, Illinois, just outside of St. Louis, next week.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve got four great drivers, great teams,\u201d Bell said. \u201cI mean, I go back to, when was it, 2019 when all four of the JGR cars were incredible. This is right there with it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bell\u2019s win meant all four JGR drivers claimed wins this year, the first time that\u2019s happened since that dominant 2019 season when the late Kyle Busch, Hamlin, Martin Truex Jr. and Erik Jones won 19 of 36 races and Busch brought Gibbs his fifth and latest NASCAR title.<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s JGR quartet has won eight races and Toyota has won 15 of 27 events this season. Hamlin remains on top, even though he had the lowest JGR finish (18th) at Darlington, where a midrace crash cost him a chance to extend his points lead.<\/p>\n
Bell sits second while Briscoe is fifth and Gibbs sixth. 23XI driver Tyler Reddick, who had five victories to lead the series this season, is fourth in the standings in another Toyota.<\/p>\n
JGR co-owner Heather Gibbs, Ty\u2019s mother, said the organization would be disappointed if one of the four wasn\u2019t holding the trophy after the final race at Homestead-Miami Speedway in November.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we\u2019ve worked so hard as a team and as an organization to be consistent and have four competitive cars,\u201d she said. \u201cObviously points, coming, showing up every week, just as Christopher has, having all those top twos where it\u2019s criticized, and that makes a championship-caliber team to be consistent.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bell joked that he was going to say he had two free weeks to work on other things since he had advanced to the next round. But that was under the old playoff format, which NASCAR ditched to return to Chase racing, where all 16 qualifiers compete in all 10 races without eliminations.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no more weeks off, and I love it,\u201d Bell said.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a consistent JGR approach to racing that has brought the organization 235 wins since Dale Jarrett won the 1993 Daytona 500 for the three-time Super Bowl-winning, NFL coach-turned-auto racing entrepreneur.<\/p>\n
Adam Stevens, Bell\u2019s crew chief, said JGR often has had a dominant program. But rarely has the talent behind the wheel, in the garage, in leadership and in research and development been so high across the board.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think all of our teams are in a really good spot in that regard, and I think that we\u2019re kind of seeing, you know, we have the capablity,\u201d Stevens said. \u201cWe have the program and we have the ability to make good and bad decisions with that information. But the internal strength individually of the teams is next-level right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a rare moment Bell knows he and his teammates should pounce on before the rest of the garage catches up.<\/p>\n
\u201cRight now we\u2019re on top,\u201d he said, \u201cbut we won\u2019t be up there forever, that\u2019s for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
See AP\u2019s full auto racing coverage here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DARLINGTON, S.C. (AP) \u2014 The Chase leader and favorite, the newest Southern 500 champion and two rising young…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":887041,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[49,48,634,82],"class_list":["post-887040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nascar","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nascar","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=887040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887040\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/887041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=887040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=887040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=887040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}