Christopher Bell drives the No. 20 Toyota for Joe Gibbs Racing, and he has spent the better part of the Next Gen era watching Daytona and Talladega turn into fuel economy contests. After Talladega’s spring race, he decided he was done being diplomatic about it.
Speaking at Texas Motor Speedway ahead of Sunday’s Cup race, Bell went further than most drivers are willing to go on record.
“It’s time to focus on the speedway package,” he said. “We desperately need change. We’ve needed change for a long time.”
This is a driver with 13 Cup wins and the best average finish in the 2025 season laying out a systemic problem that the sport has largely tip-toed around.
The Race Itself Made His Point
Since the Next Gen car arrived in 2022 – a platform carrying significantly more drag – passing in the draft at Daytona and Talladega has become extremely difficult, pushing teams toward pit strategy and fuel saving as their primary tools for climbing the tables. The result has been dull superspeedway racing at venues that used to be appointment television.
Bell watched all of that play out again at Talladega and came away with zero patience left for further incremental fixes.
“Hopefully, that is the last time that we race that speedway package,” he said. “I think a lot of us in the industry would be very excited about that.”
He wasn’t just talking about the entertainment value. He was talking about what the package actually produces in terms of racing. “It’s literally a lottery race,” Bell said before adding:And then he got specific: “It’s atrocious. Now, the strategy is so spelled out that it becomes all about fuel saving, and we try and adjust the stage lengths so that we’re not fuel saving. Well, you can’t pass. It becomes all about shortening the last pit stop to as short as you can get it.”
Bell noted that, despite NASCAR‘s efforts to change stage lengths at Talladega specifically to reduce fuel saving, it remained the story of the day anyway.
That’s about as clear a sign as any that the fix needs to go deeper than stage scheduling.
“It’s a joke,” Bell said. “It’s a complete joke. I look forward to changes … The package that we have right now, you can’t do anything. Eight of the top 10 with 40 [laps] to go were eight of the top 10 with one to go … It’s really bad what we have right now … Stage 2 and 3 when we had enough fuel to finish the stages, you’re still part-throttle because you’re right up the guy in front of you. It becomes a suicide mission of who’s going to push the hardest and not get wrecked.”
A field of the best stock car drivers in the world, racing at partial throttle and hoping not to trigger a chain reaction. That’s not racing. That’s a waiting game with a 200mph speed limit.
NASCAR Is Listening, at Least This Time
Bell is not the only one pushing.
Denny Hamlin has been among the most vocal critics of the current package, and NASCAR is now considering a shorter spoiler to reduce drag at superspeedways, with a working group of teams representing Chevrolet, Ford, and Toyota set to meet with NASCAR officials about the superspeedway rules package, discussions that intensified in the wake of Talladega.
NASCAR vice president of race communications Mike Forde said the Talladega race generated enough feedback from the industry to warrant taking another look.
Potential changes reportedly include trimming the rear spoiler to reduce drag, or adding more underbody downforce to improve aerodynamic performance outside of the draft. Neither is a guaranteed cure, and NASCAR’s own position is that making changes to the race car without testing is a problem, and replicating superspeedway pack conditions requires at least 15 cars on track simultaneously.
This is a legitimate complaint. But it’s also the same sport that found a way to run a race inside a football stadium, so finding time to test a spoiler trim isn’t exactly insurmountable.
Bell finished 17th at Talladega. He sits ninth in the Cup standings heading into Texas.
The results barely matter after what he said, because this isn’t about one bad race. The current superspeedway package has drained the skill out of two of NASCAR’s most storied events for three-plus seasons now, and more and more of the people actually doing the driving are saying so out loud. When the drivers stop filtering it, the sport should probably start listening.