Christopher Bell will be in the No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota at Pocono Raceway on Sunday despite racing with a fractured left wrist, after the team confirmed Tuesday evening that the 31 year old had been medically cleared to compete in the Great American Getaway 400.
Bell sustained the injury in a violent crash on Lap 148 of Sunday’s FireKeepers Casino 400 at Michigan International Speedway, when Chase Elliott lost control alongside him in Turn 4 and collected the No. 20, sending both cars hard into the outside SAFER barrier. The impact was widely reported as the hardest recorded in the Next Gen era, which dates back to the car’s introduction in 2022.
How the Crash Unfolded
The incident came with just 52 laps remaining at Michigan, in a race that Denny Hamlin went on to win by more than 11 seconds for his 63rd career Cup victory. Elliott’s No. 9 Chevrolet stepped out as the two ran side by side through Turn 4, and the contact pinned Bell on a trajectory that left him almost no time to scrub speed before the wall. Both drivers climbed out under their own power, and Bell was evaluated and released from the infield care center without speaking to reporters.
The full picture only emerged after Bell returned home to North Carolina. X-rays taken there confirmed a fracture in his left wrist, and Joe Gibbs Racing spent Monday and Tuesday working through the evaluation process with Bell’s doctors and NASCAR’s medical staff. Team owner Joe Gibbs had flagged the concern immediately after the race, noting in his post race press conference that both Bell’s wrist and ankle were being looked at.
By Tuesday evening the answer was in. Bell was cleared to drive, no relief driver would be needed, and the No. 20 team would arrive at Pocono with its lineup intact.
“Thank you to each and everyone who reached out to check on me, I truly feel the love,” Bell wrote on social media after the announcement. “I’m grateful for my team of doctors, JGR, NASCAR and all of the previous drivers who have helped pave the way for the safety standards in our sport. See you in Pocono!”
What Clearance Means for the No. 20 Team
The clearance spares Joe Gibbs Racing a scramble it had little time to manage. Cup teams have no standing reserve drivers, and finding a substitute capable of qualifying, practicing and racing a 2.5 mile track as unusual as Pocono on four days’ notice is one of the hardest asks in the sport. Any points scored by a substitute would also have stayed with the car rather than the driver, damaging Bell’s championship position at the exact moment it needs protecting.
That position took a hit at Michigan regardless. Bell’s 31st place DNF dropped him three spots to 10th in the standings at the halfway point of the 26 race regular season. Tyler Reddick leads the championship on 340 points ahead of Hamlin on 289, and with 15 of 26 regular season races complete, the battle for playoff seeding bonus points is intensifying behind them. Bell already has a win this season, so his playoff berth is not in immediate danger, but every stage point and finishing position from here shapes his seeding when the postseason begins.
There is also the matter of the wrist itself. A left wrist fracture is about as unwelcome an injury as a road racer or oval racer can carry into Pocono, a track where drivers wrestle heavy steering loads through three corners that each demand a different line, a different entry speed and a different amount of muscle. Unlike a short oval, where a driver can settle into a rhythm, Pocono’s 2.5 miles ask for constant, precise inputs. How Bell’s wrist responds across a 400 mile race, particularly in traffic and on older tires, is one of the genuine unknowns of the weekend.
Racing Hurt Is a NASCAR Tradition With Modern Limits
NASCAR history is full of drivers who raced through injuries that would sideline athletes in most other sports. Richard Petty won races with a broken neck he kept quiet about. Ricky Rudd famously taped his swollen eyelids open to run the 1984 Busch Clash days after a savage Daytona crash. The late Kyle Busch, whose death last month at age 41 left the entire garage grieving, missed 11 races with a broken leg and foot in 2015, then returned to win the championship that November under a playoff waiver in one of the great comeback stories in American sports. Denny Hamlin, Bell’s teammate, raced through a torn ACL in 2013 and back trouble for years afterward.
What has changed is the process around those decisions. Since the concussion controversies of the mid 2010s and the data gathered from the Next Gen car’s early crashes, NASCAR has formalized its medical clearance procedures. A driver involved in a significant impact must be evaluated at the track, and any subsequent diagnosis triggers a review involving the sanctioning body’s medical liaisons before the driver can return. The clearance Bell received is not a formality. It reflects a judgment by his doctors and NASCAR that the fracture is stable enough to withstand racing loads without risking further damage or compromising his control of the car.
The Next Gen car’s crash data has been under scrutiny all season, with the current low downforce package producing faster corner speeds and a wave of brake failures at Nashville earlier this month that put several drivers into the wall. Bell’s Michigan impact will feed into that same body of research, and the severity reading it produced explains why Joe Gibbs Racing waited until Tuesday evening to confirm his status rather than declaring him fit on Sunday night.
Pocono itself occupies a sobering place in that history. It was in qualifying at this track in July 2022 that Kurt Busch suffered the concussion that ultimately ended his full time driving career, a crash that looked unremarkable in real time but exposed how stiff the original Next Gen rear structure was in certain impacts. The injuries Busch and Alex Bowman sustained that season pushed NASCAR into a redesigned rear clip and revised crash standards for 2023, changes that softened the car’s worst tendencies. Every clearance decision since, including the one that puts Bell in the car this weekend, is made against the lessons of that period, with impact data reviewed rather than guesswork and bravado deciding who straps in.
Bell’s Pocono Record and Sunday’s Outlook
Pocono has been a quietly productive track for Bell. In eight Cup starts at the Tricky Triangle he has two top fives and three top 10s, with a best finish of fourth achieved twice, in 2021 and 2022. He has never led a large number of laps there, but his average finish puts him comfortably in the top tier of active drivers at the track, and the No. 20 team’s intermediate program has been strong enough this season to make him a factor if the wrist cooperates.
The competitive picture around him is daunting. Hamlin arrives at Pocono as the all time wins leader at the track with seven victories and chasing the first three race winning streak of his career, having taken back to back wins at Nashville and Michigan. Goodyear is also bringing a new right side tire to Pocono this weekend, which adds a setup variable every team must solve in a single practice session, and which could either mask or magnify the difficulty of muscling a Cup car around the track with a healing wrist.
The Great American Getaway 400 runs 160 laps and 400 miles on Sunday, June 14, at 3 p.m. ET, with coverage on Prime Video, MRN Radio and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. Bell will go through Saturday’s practice and qualifying session as the first real test of the wrist under load. If it holds, a driver who has made a career of outrunning expectations will have one more story to add to NASCAR’s long ledger of racers who refused to watch from the pit box.
