Bell's second victory this season shakes up the Cup Series Playoff standings with four races remaining.
After opening with 103 consecutive, uneventful, single-file green-flag laps with only five leaders, the final half-dozen laps featured a series of late-race cautions. There was a brief red flag, multi-car crashes that probably deserved cautions, and track repairs. All that melee and restarts conspired to take an almost-sure victory from Chase Elliott and delivered it to almost-unnoticed Christopher Bell. By almost any measure, it was among the season’s most surprising endings.
Bell was hardly a factor all day as Elliott , pole-winner Logano , Allmendinger , and Reddick led all but the race’s 10 laps. The JGR No. 20 Toyota driver wasn’t in the top-10 after the first or second stage and led only once for the final two laps after passing Harvick. He was lined up 11th for the final restart, but was on fresher tires. “I don’t even know ,” he confessed. “When I came off pit road and was the first car with tires, I was trying to see where I stacked up. I saw there were 11 cars that stayed out on old tires and I was the first one on new tires. I said, ‘I guess we're going to roll the dice here and see what happens.’”
The 112-lap, 260-mile overtime race was the third and last—after Texas and Talladega—in the second round of the four-round NASCAR Championship Playoffs. Round 3 begins next weekend at Las Vegas, then goes to Homestead before closing at Martinsville. Any winner from that round and the highest-ranked in points will advance to the Nov. 6 season-ending Championship 4 near Phoenix.
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