Christopher Bell: NASCAR playoff schedule is 'hair-raising'

For the last two years, Christopher Bell has made strong runs in the NASCAR Playoffs to reach the Championship 4 in Phoenix. This season, things are different with the layout of the first round and the addition of a couple of races that aren’t usually seen in the postseason.

Atlanta and Watkins Glen are the first two races of the Round of 16. They are new additions and for The Glen, there’s even a new tire. Atlanta is a superspeedway that can produce a three-wide finish within 0.007 seconds of each other. So, that’s a wildcard.

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Oh yeah, remember Bristol and all of the tire trouble there?

“Well in one way it does feel a little bit safer. But the schedule, man,” Bell said on The Teardown with Jordan Bianchi and Jeff Gluck. “The schedule is just, it’s hair-raising. We go to, in the past, the Round of 16, you would start off at Darlington, which is a real race track and people, the best guys are going to score the points at Darlington. This time we start off at Atlanta. Well, we all know how Atlanta can be. We can get some people in there that, you just never know who’s going to score points at Atlanta.

“And then we go to Watkins Glen which should be a normal road course but yet we have a tire that is supposed to produce a lot of tire deg, and we don’t, that could be a Bristol race from the spring, we don’t know. Then we go to Bristol, which from the tire test, I think everyone is expecting it to be a duplicate of the spring race. So, we’ve got three races that are all going to be not traditional races.”

Christopher Bell might have shaky start to NASCAR Playoffs

In his Cup Series career, Bell only has one top-10 finish and start at the newly configured Atlanta. However, he’s had nothing but top-10 finishes in his Cup Series career at Watkins Glen.

Christopher Bell has good results at Bristol as well. He was the pole-sitter and finished P3 at the Last Great Colosseum last season. Even in the tire battle that went down in March this year, Bell finished P10 and scored stage points in both stages.

Again, I think Bell is right to be worried. The old layout with Darlington, Kansas, and Bristol was more straightforward. Now, there is more opportunities for disaster to strike.

Get caught up in the big one at Atlanta? There goes your points buffer. Don’t manage the tires well at The Glen or Bristol? Well, you might as well start packing it up.

Christopher Bell is a savvy driver. He makes good points here, but I’m not convinced that he doesn’t feel confident heading into the NASCAR Playoffs. This is where he has shined the last two seasons and where he hopes to show off once again.