No driver was as dominant as Christopher Bell at Phoenix on Sunday in the Straight Talk Wireless 500, as he led 176 laps and looked set to capture his first victory of the season. Unfortunately, fate had different plans for him, and Adam Stevens made a call that ultimately forced him to settle for the runner-up position.
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In the last stop of the race, with 22 laps to go, Stevens ordered all four tires in the Camry to be changed. Ryan Blaney, the ultimate race winner, meanwhile, changed only two tires. The decision Blaney’s crew took ended up being the right one. Bell returned to the track in eighth place and had to fight his way through traffic. As the laps ran out, he didn’t have enough time to get past the leader.
Blaney’s tires were beginning to lose grip there towards the end, and a few more laps would have changed the outcome. But as things were, Bell ended up 0.399 seconds behind him. Stevens could be blamed for opting to change all four tires when two would have gotten the job done. But the crew chief defended his call in a post-race interview.
“I thought the four tires would go to the front,” he said. “We restarted maybe a spot or two further back than I thought we might. I still thought there was enough time. We didn’t get a great restart on that first one. Settled out to P8. And then, unfortunately, we got that follow-up caution, and that just burned up a lot of green flag laps.”
Stevens noted that had they fared better on the first restart and had the caution, they might still have won. Or if the caution hadn’t come out at all, they might have won. A lot had to go wrong to stop Bell from reaching Victory Lane, and they did. Interestingly, this is the same kind of call that resulted in Denny Hamlin losing the 2025 Cup Series championship.
During the final restart of the season finale last year, Hamlin’s team fitted his car with four new tires. Kyle Larson had chosen to go for two new tires. And it was he who was crowned champion. This recent race was largely reminiscent of that outing.
Bell now sits sixth on the points table with 113 points. Thanks to the win, Blaney jumped past Bubba Wallace and sits second with 165 points, 60 behind Tyler Reddick.
