NASCAR Explains Why It Disallowed Christopher Bell’s Wall Ride At Martinsville
Christopher Bell was in the NASCAR Cup Series Championship 4 for 27 minutes on Sunday night, but the last-lap pass at Martinsville that got him there was ultimately disallowed and left him below the cut-line for the final.
Bell was running in 19th and needed to make up one position to catch William Byron in the points and beat him into the Championship 4 on a tiebreaker.
Fortuitously, Bell’s fellow Toyota driver Bubba Wallace was running in 18th and had a tire issue on the last lap, or so he claimed, which slowed him and allowed Bell to get by.
Unfortunately, there was traffic in front of them and Bell was going too fast and ran into the wall as he made the pass in the final turn.
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He then proceeded to get on the gas and ride the wall through the rest of Turn 4 before he could get away from it as he entered the straight.
The move was similar to Ross Chastain’s “Hail Melon” in 2022, which was an intentional attempt to pass Denny Hamlin and started at the entry to Turn 3.
NASCAR and the teams decided to make it clear that such a move would not be tolerated in the future and would be deemed a safety violation.
That was ultimately the verdict on Bell’s move and he was scored at the tail end of the lead lap cars in 22nd position, which left him fifth in the standings and out of the final.
NASCAR VP of competition, Elton Sawyer explained the decision after the race.
“You go back two years when we had the situation with Ross here, we went to Phoenix, there was a lot of dialogue with the drivers that that’s not a move that we want to have to make on the last lap,” Sawyer said.
“That’s strictly to protect our drivers and to protect our fans.”
Bell said after the race that he didn’t itnend to ride the wall and Sawyer said he didn’t want to speculate on his intent or factor it into the ruling.
“We looked at the data, we looked at video and we’ve been very clear based off our conversations with our industry based off that move two years ago that that would not be tolerated,” Sawyer said.
As for the nearly half-hour deliberation, Sawyer said NASCAR didn’t want to rush it and wanted to get the call right.
“This is not something that happens every week,” Sawyer said. “We’ll go back and figure out if we could’ve made that decision faster.”
Bell’s team owner Joe Gibbs wanted to protest the ruling, but was told that was not allowed under NASCAR rules.
“It’s a race violation. Race violation, you don’t protest them,” Sawyer said. “It’s not appealable, I should say. No different than an uncontrolled tire or too many men over the wall or anything like that.”
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Sawyer’s team will be looking at the circumstances around Wallace slowing on the last lap, however, as well as what appeared to be Austin Dillon and Ross Chastain teaming up to block for their fellow Chevrolet Driver Byron in the closing laps as faster cars closed in behind them.
“Yeah, we’ll look at everything. As I said earlier, we want to go back, as we would have done anyway. We’ll get back, we’ll take all the data, video. We’ll listen to in-car audio. We’ll do all that, as we would any event,” Sayer said, suggesting that penalties could be assigned if NASCAR determines there were any violations of the sporting rules.
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