CHRISTOPHER BELL, No. 20 Rheem Toyota Supra, Joe Gibbs Racing
Finishing Position: 1st
Could you have scripted the win any better?
“I don’t know man. That’s pretty cool. To get my first win here with the Dash 4 Cash bonus. Thank you to Xfinity for doing that and more importantly thank you to Rheem, Ruud, everyone at Toyota, TRD (Toyota Racing Development), everyone at Joe Gibbs Racing. These Supras are super, super fast. Joe Gibbs Racing has a really, really good package here at Bristol, but for whatever reason we struggled to find it. I didn’t feel good basically all of practice and didn’t qualify good and as soon as they dropped the green flag for the race I was really, really loose. The longer the runs went, the better I got. I’m just very thankful to be here at Joe Gibbs Racing driving for such a wonderful team.”
Your pit crew really delivered this race.
“They’ve been taking care of us. We’ve had fast race cars every single week. My guys on pit road have been outstanding. It seems like week in and week out, every stop they’re able to pick us up a couple of spots. That’s huge. That’s really huge.”
How does it feel to hold a check for $100,000?
“It feels really good. Cardboard checks are my favorite trophies. I’ve got a couple of them from the dirt races, but none of them say a hundred grand so that’s pretty cool.”
Talk about that battle you had going on in the last stage.
“It was tough. I knew that if it would stay green I’d have a better shot because this thing was really good on the long run. The yellow came out with 35 (laps) to go and I was like man, if I can get the lead off pit road I think I can hold them off and then Brandon (Jones), my teammate, got out there on old tires and was doing a really good job. Ultimately I was okay with that because I was still in the spot for the one hundred grand and then he started fading and my car started coming to me and I felt really good.”
Was the most nerve-wracking part of the day the restarts for you?
“This thing was just really, really loose on taking off. Obviously it was really, really good in the long run and that’s what we needed. We needed a 35-lap run car and the longer that thing was going to go the better off we were.”
