Toyota Racing – Christopher Bell
NASCAR XFINITY Series (NXS)
Texas Motor Speedway – November 2, 2018
Joe Gibbs Racing driver Christopher Bell was made available to the media at Texas Motor Speedway:
CHRISTOPHER BELL, No. 20 GameStop Camry, Joe Gibbs Racing
Where have your thoughts been after the last Xfinity Series race at Kansas with the first lap accident?
“I’ll be honest, the days after Kansas I started to get pretty apprehensive just because nobody expected that and it’s just kind of a wakeup call, right? That could have happened on a green-white-checkered restart and the outcome, hopefully I would have gained stage points, but the outcome would have been really similar. It can happen at any time and it’s very easy to do. I started getting apprehensive thinking about that and just talked to some of my mentors and they gave me really good advice. They just said, ‘You can’t worry about that, the only thing you can do is control what you can control.’ If we can go out here and perform like we know we’re capable of and like we should then we’ll be in really good shape, but if it’s not meant to be, it’s not meant to be. I’m just going to go out here and enjoy driving race cars and we have three really fun races left so I’m excited about that.”
How do you think changing the start-finish line location at Phoenix will impact the race next weekend?
“The biggest thing for me I think is going to be the NASCAR rules. Whenever you go to the mile-and-a-half race tracks, there’s a really wide apron on the frontstretch, they have a rule where you cannot use the apron until you get to the start-finish line. With the start-finish line being on part of the dogleg, I think it’s going to be a really big advantage to be on the bottom and shortcut that dogleg as soon as you get passed the start-finish line. It will be interesting to see their rules on when you can get onto the apron and I think its going to be fun, but it’s going to be hectic.”
What is it you like about racing here at Texas Motor Speedway?
“Texas is my home race track so I get to come here and I’ll have a bunch of family here so that will be cool. As far as the race track itself, the old Texas was my all-time favorite NASCAR track, it was really fun. Each time you come back here the track weathers a little bit more and hopefully over time it will get back to that really wide where you can spread out and run all over.”
How does the weather impact setups at Texas?
“We kind of experienced the maximum temperature swing here in the spring where it was 85 and humid, felt like a 90-degree day here in practice and then it felt like a 30-degree day in the race. From that point, I can’t speak for the crew chiefs, but as a driver you’re throttle traces change significantly, but as far as setup-wise, I didn’t get in the race car on Saturday on race day and feel any different than I did on Friday. Just you were going quite a bit faster. I’m sure the crew chiefs might answer that a little bit differently, but I didn’t feel my car change a whole lot.”
