Christopher Bell lost the Bank of America 400 on Sunday, Oct. 11, by 0.029 seconds, the second-closest finish in Charlotte Motor Speedway history, and he left the track closer to the points lead than when he arrived.
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He won the second stage, led 93 laps, and finished runner-up to Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Chase Briscoe. The 53 points he took home trimmed Kyle Larson’s lead from 55 to 51.
Under the playoff system that ran from 2014 through 2025, even a P2 finish like that could feel like a wasted afternoon, and Bell is well aware of that. Not too long ago, he won the Chase opener at Darlington, and afterward he joked about what that win would have been worth under the old rules and how he would have gotten to take the “next two weeks off.”
In a recent interview with SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, a clip of which was posted on X, Christopher Bell made a callback to that moment, saying,
“Like I was joking around after Darlington, you know what this feels like: you win the first race of a round in the old playoff system, and you’re on easy street, man. For two weeks, the next two weeks, you’re in off-season…”
With the Chase having returned, that has changed. Good days carry over now, and so do the bad ones. As Bell puts it, “Everything matters now. Every stage, every race, every position that you’re fighting for.”
After the 26-race regular season, the top 16 drivers progress further and are reseeded once, from 2,100 points for the top seed down to 2,000 for the 16th. Then they run 10 races with no cuts, no win-and-in and no winner-take-all finale. Most points after Homestead-Miami takes the title.
A win pays 55, and a flawless night with both stage wins pays 75. If the driver also nabs the fastest lap, the total can reach 76, as Larson did at Kansas.
The Hendrick Motorsports driver began the Chase as the seventh seed at 2,045, exactly one win worth of 55 points behind the top seed. He now has 2,367 and leads Denny Hamlin by 49.
Bell also argues that in the old format, during the regular season, the points battle mattered far more than it used to, because the old way was win or bust. If you weren’t in position to win, you just moved on to the next race.
This changes the equation of a title contender massively. A crew chief who once might have rolled the dice on fuel mileage to chase a win now has to factor in what a 20th-place finish costs, because that result stays on the books all the way to the Chase finale.
In an earlier interaction with Autoweek, Bell said that a major difference between the two formats is a much larger penalty for a mistake, such as when someone is pushing too hard for a win and ends up crashing. Hence, every driver has to weigh risk versus reward.
Bell has the evidence to show it: a P19 at WWTR and a P23 at Vegas in his first five Chase races, the two bad days that never left. Meanwhile, Larson won twice in that span and never finished outside the top five, averaging 54.6 points a race compared to Bell’s 42.6. That 12-point gap per race adds up to 60 over five weeks, more than a full win.
Charlotte finally ended Larson’s top-five streak with a sixth-place finish, and even that paid 49 points.
Bell admits the field misread all this. Before the Chase, he figured about 400 points over the 10 races would win the title. Larson has 322 through six. According to him, nobody understood how big the win bonus would turn out to be.
Charlotte presented both sides of the coin. Briscoe’s win paid 68 points and Bell’s second paid 53, so a margin you could barely see on the stopwatch was worth 15 in the standings. Hamlin’s fifth-place finish earned 40 and let him slip from 40 points behind Larson to 49. Bell, with that runner-up, pulled within two points of Hamlin for second.
Every result moved something.
Bell has been upfront about what he needs. He told Autoweek that three wins in the last five races would win him his first title. Charlotte used up one of those five without a win, so the ask is now three in four, with Phoenix next and the eventual finale at Homestead-Miami.
He called the format a hit and said NASCAR delivered.
Mark Martin would agree to that point. The Hall of Famer played a huge role in bringing back the Chase. In an interaction with Motorsport.com, he revealed having meetings with NASCAR because, in his view, most fans wanted every race to count. He risked his reputation saying so, and he remembers the first room going silent.
No support came after the first meeting or the second. After the third, he said, NASCAR told him TV obligations left no path to anything but a playoff. What arrived was the middle road: still a postseason, minus the eliminations and the free pass for winners. Martin wanted the whole season to count. Bell, from inside the car, describes a Chase that comes quite close.
For 12 seasons, the title came down to one race at the end. Now, four races are left, and things could still change. Larson currently leads by 49 points, Hamlin and Bell are separated by two, and the old trick of winning your way into a two-week nap no longer exists.
Christopher Bell is third in the standings with four races left, nothing to bank and, by his own account, nothing he’d change.