Don‘t expect the Joe Gibbs Racing juggernaut to lose steam anytime soon.
After Christopher Bell charged to victory in Saturday‘s Bass Pro Shops Night Race at Bristol Motor Speedway — completing the organization‘s sweep of the first round of the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs — team owner Joe Gibbs basked in the afterglow of yet another job well done.
“Yeah, just so excited about the start to the playoffs,” Gibbs said. “Just appreciate everybody back at our race shop. I talk about that all the time. We’ll hang a banner on Monday, and I get a chance to thank them, but it honestly takes everybody to be able to get our cars to the race track like this.
“We’ve got fast cars right now. It means a lot.”
All three of JGR‘s playoff drivers had a hand in the sweep. Chase Briscoe opened the postseason with a victory in the Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway. Denny Hamlin followed with a win at World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway.
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Bell completed the sweep by grabbing the lead after a restart with four laps left, as unexpectedly extreme tire degradation dictated a hodgepodge of strategies that produced 38 lead changes among 14 drivers and repeatedly shuffled the running order.
“I would have bet my house that it was going to be a normal Bristol race,” said Bell‘s crew chief Adam Stevens, who was shocked by the fall-off of the new right-side tires Goodyear provided for the elimination race.
Fortunately, Stevens still has a place to live, and he and Bell will head to the Round of 12 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway with confidence born of two sources: Bell‘s victory at Bristol and his overwhelming success at the 1-mile flat track in the Granite State.
In five Cup Series starts at the Magic Mile, Bell has two victories, a runner-up finish and a pole. Last year, he used his dirt-track background and ability to find optimal racing lines to win a Loudon race that concluded on wet tires.
In the NASCAR Xfinity Series, Bell is undefeated in four starts at New Hampshire. He also participated in a July tire test at the track, along with fellow playoff drivers Joey Logano and Ross Chastain.
To explain JGR‘s blazing start to the playoffs, look no further than the choice of tracks this year.
MORE: Playoff Pulse: Tires and tribulation jumble up the title hopefuls at Bristol
After hosting the regular-season cutoff race in 2024, Darlington returned to its typical spot as the playoff opener, replacing Atlanta. Hamlin is the leading active winner at the “Lady in Black” with five victories, and Briscoe was the defending winner of the Southern 500, in a Stewart-Haas Racing Ford, before moving to JGR in 2025.
At Gateway, which supplanted the Watkins Glen road course as the site of the second playoff race, Hamlin was a two-time runner-up before winning last Sunday, and Bell showed potential race-winning speed and swept the first two stages last year before engine issues dropped him to seventh at the finish.
The change of venues in the Round of 16 certainly helped, but the speed in the Gibbs cars is also undeniable. JGR’s Ty Gibbs, who missed the playoffs, led a race-high 201 of 500 laps at Bristol before trouble accessing pit road and a collision with Austin Hill‘s Chevrolet sapped his winning chances.
Briscoe led 127 laps and Bell 12 — including the one that counted.
At New Hampshire, the JGR drivers will try to extend their winning streak to four. Then it‘s off to Kansas Speedway, where Hamlin is the leading active winner with four victories.
It‘s convenient — not to mention encouraging to other teams — to recall the words of Hal Holbrook to Charlie Sheen in the movie Wall Street: “You‘re on a roll, kid. Enjoy it while it lasts — because it never does.”
The current tidal wave at Joe Gibbs Racing, however, feels more enduring. The remaining tracks on the playoff schedule set up beautifully for the organization, which seems poised to break Team Penske‘s three-year stranglehold on the series championship.
But which Gibbs driver will do the honors? That‘s where the guesswork is involved.
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