DARLINGTON, S.C. (AP) — The Chase leader and favorite, the newest Southern 500 champion and two rising young racers who had top-six finishes at Darlington Raceway to open NASCAR’s postseason on Sunday night — the hardest challenge for the four Joe Gibbs Racing drivers might be vying against one another for the Cup Series title.
“Our teams have hit it,” said Christopher Bell, whose late pass on leader Kyle Larson led to his first Southern 500 crown.
“Yeah, we need to make the most of it now, because we know how it goes.”
Right now, it’s all coming up Toyota and JGR in NASCAR. Denny Hamlin was the regular-season champion and favorite to collect his first championship in the series.
Ty Gibbs, team owner Joe Gibbs’ grandson, is showing his skills with 18 top-10 finishes — he was runner-up to Bell at Darlington — including victories at Bristol and Iowa.
Chase Briscoe, in his second season with JGR, has 16 top 10s and finished sixth in his quest for a third consecutive Southern 500 trophy.
Bell had endured a frustrating season, with seven second-place finishes and a wrist injury suffered in a crash at Michigan that he thought would derail his season. But with fresher tires after Larson stayed out on the track instead of changing to new tread, Bell quickly tracked down the defending NASCAR champion and broke through to victory lane for the first time this season.
He also cut into Hamlin’s Chase points lead, moving from 50 behind to just 12 as the series heads to World Wide Technology Raceway in Madison, Illinois, just outside of St. Louis, next week.
“We’ve got four great drivers, great teams,” Bell said. “I mean, I go back to, when was it, 2019 when all four of the JGR cars were incredible. This is right there with it.”
Bell’s win meant all four JGR drivers claimed wins this year, the first time that’s happened since that dominant 2019 season when the late Kyle Busch, Hamlin, Martin Truex Jr. and Erik Jones won 19 of 36 races and Busch brought Gibbs his fifth and latest NASCAR title.
This year’s JGR quartet has won eight races and Toyota has won 15 of 27 events this season. Hamlin remains on top, even though he had the lowest JGR finish (18th) at Darlington, where a midrace crash cost him a chance to extend his points lead.
Bell sits second while Briscoe is fifth and Gibbs sixth. 23XI driver Tyler Reddick, who had five victories to lead the series this season, is fourth in the standings in another Toyota.
JGR co-owner Heather Gibbs, Ty’s mother, said the organization would be disappointed if one of the four wasn’t holding the trophy after the final race at Homestead-Miami Speedway in November.
“I think we’ve worked so hard as a team and as an organization to be consistent and have four competitive cars,” she said. “Obviously points, coming, showing up every week, just as Christopher has, having all those top twos where it’s criticized, and that makes a championship-caliber team to be consistent.”
Bell joked that he was going to say he had two free weeks to work on other things since he had advanced to the next round. But that was under the old playoff format, which NASCAR ditched to return to Chase racing, where all 16 qualifiers compete in all 10 races without eliminations.
“There’s no more weeks off, and I love it,” Bell said.
It’s a consistent JGR approach to racing that has brought the organization 235 wins since Dale Jarrett won the 1993 Daytona 500 for the three-time Super Bowl-winning, NFL coach-turned-auto racing entrepreneur.
Adam Stevens, Bell’s crew chief, said JGR often has had a dominant program. But rarely has the talent behind the wheel, in the garage, in leadership and in research and development been so high across the board.
“I think all of our teams are in a really good spot in that regard, and I think that we’re kind of seeing, you know, we have the capablity,” Stevens said. “We have the program and we have the ability to make good and bad decisions with that information. But the internal strength individually of the teams is next-level right now.”
It’s a rare moment Bell knows he and his teammates should pounce on before the rest of the garage catches up.
“Right now we’re on top,” he said, “but we won’t be up there forever, that’s for sure.”
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