[autotag]Christopher Bell[/autotag] has plenty of experience with dirt racing. Before focusing more on NASCAR, Bell won the 2013 USAC National Midget Series championship, three Chili Bowl events, and five World of Outlaws races. Speaking of NASCAR, the driver of the No. 20 car also won the final dirt race at Bristol Motor Speedway before returning to the pavement.
This marks the first time NASCAR hasn’t brought the Cup Series to Bristol Dirt since 2020. Due to this fact, Bell spoke to NBC Sports about the future of the Cup Series on dirt tracks. Obviously, the comments from Bell are significant due to his past dirt racing success.
“I don’t think we should go down the path of having one dirt race a year,” Bell said. “Whenever you have that single event, it becomes easy to overlook and then people don’t take it seriously. We saw that in road course racing early on in the sport…If you weren’t a good road course racer, you would just kind of put it behind you and it was easy to put it behind you, and ‘Well, on to the next one.’”
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“The dirt race was very much that same way. For all of the teams that didn’t have a dirt driver, it was just kind of an off week for them, a throw away event.”