Christopher Bell climbed out of his No. 20 Toyota at Iowa Speedway on Aug. 9 and delivered a verdict on his own season that needed no follow-up questions. “This is what you call a bad second-place finish,” he told reporters. “I don’t know what else to say.”
It was his seventh runner-up finish of the year, tying Harry Gant’s 1981 mark for the most second-place results in a season without a win. Gant set that record 45 years ago. Bell has matched it in a single summer, and not one driver in NASCAR history has ever finished second more times than that without a trip to Victory Lane.
“Similar to two weeks ago with Corey Heim, he just didn’t make a mistake. So… P2,” Bell said of Ty Gibbs, who beat him to the checkered flag at Iowa by 0.253 seconds after Bell had led 108 laps, the second-most of any driver in the race.
Seven ways to lose a race you should have won
Bell’s crew chief, Adam Stevens, has been almost as blunt about the gap between speed and results. “Just a mind-boggling year to be so fast and generally have what we need to compete and not have made a trip to victory lane,” Stevens said after Iowa.
Each of Bell’s seven runner-up finishes has its own explanation, and none of them repeat. At Phoenix in March, a double round of late cautions let Ryan Blaney escape by 0.399 seconds after Bell had led 176 laps and won a stage. “Ultimately, if we had more green-flag laps, I think we could have made a run at him, but I don’t know,” Bell said. “You win some and lose some, and this one stings.”
At Charlotte’s rain-shortened Coca-Cola 600 in May, Bell was fighting for the lead when Daniel Suarez took two tires on a late caution and jumped clear, with Bell’s own teammate Denny Hamlin slamming doors alongside him for second rather than yielding position. “Just a bummer. Wasn’t meant to be today. It’s 2026 for us,” Bell said afterward, a line that has followed him through the rest of the year.
A week later at Nashville, Hamlin caught Bell on the restart with four laps left and ran side by side with him before Chase Briscoe drafted up to complete a three-wide Joe Gibbs Racing sandwich at the white flag. Bell washed high in Turn 1 on the final lap and handed the win to Hamlin. He did not blame the traffic. “There is nobody to blame, no circumstances,” Bell said. “It was all completely in my hands, and I dropped the ball. There is literally nobody that had anything to do with losing the race but me, and it sucks.”
The one that actually stung the most
If there is a common thread in Bell’s seven near-misses, it might be his own teammates. Hamlin has beaten him twice. Briscoe beat him at Chicagoland in July after Bell spent the final laps hounding his bumper without finding a way past, a result Bell described with a rare flash of dark humor: “It was a great day… Toyotas are fast. It seems like a monkey can drive them, so it’s just disappointing when you get beat by another monkey. Just a second-place driver, man.”
Not every second place has felt like a defeat. At EchoPark in July, Bell inherited the runner-up spot after Bubba Wallace was penalized for an out-of-bounds pass on the final lap, and Bell sounded pleased with the drive itself. “It was about as good as I was gonna get. Ryan was super fast,” he said of race winner Ryan Blaney. “Our Rheem Camry was driving really good. Just had a fun day. It was a really fun race.”
The Brickyard 400 in late July produced a similar split reaction. Bell climbed from 23rd on the grid into position to challenge for the win, only for part-time rookie Corey Heim to seize control in the closing laps and hang on for his first crown jewel victory. Even in defeat, Bell found something to be proud of. “This is a good second place. We’ve had a lot of bad second-place finishes, but this one’s a good one,” he said, crediting Stevens for a strategy call that vaulted him from 14th to fourth on a late pit stop. “We pulled together a really good day. We’ve run second a lot. There’s been bad seconds. But this one’s a pretty good second.”
A season that started with three wins, not zero
The contrast with a year ago makes the drought harder to explain away. Bell won three of the first twelve races of the 2025 season and spent that spring near the top of the standings. This year, eleven races in, he described the campaign as “extremely disappointing” while pointing to a Bristol speeding penalty that erased a car he called one of his best of the year, and a Texas wreck that came after he had already driven to the point.
“I look back at Bristol Motor Speedway. We had one of our best cars all year, and I got a speeding penalty that took us out of it,” Bell said. “Going back to Texas last week, I drove all the way to the lead, leading the race, and got caught up in a spinning car, wrecked out of it. The list goes on and on and on about races we could have won.”
NASCAR analyst and Hall of Famer Kyle Petty said publicly what a lot of fans have been thinking, asking pointedly when Bell is going to start passing leaders instead of settling for position behind them, a question that captures the frustration building around the No. 20 car as the regular season winds toward its final stretch.
What a win would actually change
Bell remains 11th in the Cup Series standings, inside playoff position on points even without a victory, which is both a credit to his consistency and a reminder of how much a single win could reshape his season. A trip to Victory Lane locks in a playoff berth automatically and would let Bell stop thinking about points racing altogether over NASCAR’s final two regular-season events.
Two races remain before the postseason field is set. Bell has led laps in five of his seven runner-up finishes this year, which is not the profile of a driver who has lost his pace. It is the profile of a driver who has run out of ways to describe losing by inches, and who now heads into the closing weeks of the regular season with a record he never wanted and a season he has not stopped trying to rewrite.
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