Christopher Bell has stopped the early slide and gotten his season back on track, posting top-five finishes in each of the last three races. One DNF at the Daytona 500 still sits on the ledger, but after five starts, the No. 20 JGR driver holds sixth in the standings, with an average start and finish of 13, a sign that the tide has begun to turn.
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But what sets Bell apart is not just the run he is on, but the road he took to get here. Unlike many who grow up with stock cars as the end goal, Bell cut his teeth on dirt, where he made a name for himself with 26 wins, including a sweep of the Turkey Night Grand Prix in 2014 and a run of victories at the Chili Bowl Nationals from 2017 through 2019. At that stage, the Cup Series was not even on his radar.
But his NASCAR perspective was shaped in part by the lineup at Joe Gibbs Racing at the time, with drivers like Erik Jones in the No. 20 car and names like Denny Hamlin, Carl Edwards, and Kyle Busch already holding court. Fast forward to now, as Bell heads into a tripleheader weekend at Darlington Raceway, he recently looked back on how it all began, tracing it to a moment that could have gone the other way.
“So I got introduced to dirt track racing when I was young, probably three or four years old. I had a family friend [who] took me out to a racetrack, and I said I wanted to drive. Whenever my parents got it all set up, they spent so much money to get me all the driver’s gear. We got to the racetrack, and I said, ‘“I’m scared,” [but] after I got into the car, it was love at first drive.”
Growing up in Oklahoma, Bell was surrounded by a dirt-track scene that runs deep, from Tulsa to Oklahoma City. He spent his early years racing at I-44 Speedway and Port City Raceway. “So there’s a very, very healthy dirt track community around Oklahoma, whether that’s Tulsa or Oklahoma City. So that’s what I started doing. I grew up dirt track racing at I-44 Speedway at Port City Raceway in Tulsa.”
“I fell in love with it, and the more that I did it, the more I wanted to do it. Never in a million years did I think that dirt track racing in Oklahoma would lead me to the Cup Series racing on Sundays, but yeah, it’s been a blast,” he said. Eventually, wins on dirt opened doors on asphalt, and before long, he found himself competing in NASCAR’s top tier.
But the transition to top-level stock car racing is a different discipline requiring different funding, equipment, and connections, often necessitating a move to North Carolina. Hence, he currently lives in Mooresville, North Carolina, where he resides with his wife, Morgan. He purchased a home on the shores of Lake Norman in 2022 to be closer to his Joe Gibbs Racing team’s operations in Huntersville.
