MOORESVILLE, N.C. (Sept. 12, 2017) – While the big picture for Christopher Bell and the No. 4 SiriusXM team is to walk away from Homestead-Miami (Fla.) Speedway as the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series champions, winning the regular season title and earning 15 playoff points would go a long way towards their ultimate goal. Bell heads to Chicagoland Speedway in Joliet, Ill., for the final race of the regular season with a 30-point advantage over reigning Truck Series champion Johnny Sauter.
The intermediate tracks have been the strong suit of the No. 4 team in 2017. Bell’s series leading four wins have all come on intermediate tracks. He started his winning ways sweeping the pole and all three stages at Atlanta Motor Speedway in Hampton, Ga., in February, led a race-high 92 laps en route to victory at Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth in June, lead a race-high 54 laps en route to victory at Kentucky Speedway in Sparta in early July and picked up his fourth victory of the season in late July at Pocono Raceway in Long Pond, Pa.
All together in eight starts this season on intermediate tracks between 1.5-miles and 2.5-miles in length, the 22-year-old driver has collected four wins, three poles, seven top-five finishes and 313 laps led. Of the series-leading 24 playoff points that Bell has earned this season, all but one point which he earned through a stage win at Iowa Speedway in Newton, have been collected at the intermediate tracks.
To help him prepare for Friday night’s Truck Series race in the Windy City, Bell will pilot the No. 25 Camry from Venturini Motorsports in Thursday night’s ARCA Series race. Bell also pulled double-duty last season at Chicagoland, when he finished third in the ARCA race and fourth in the Truck Series race. The Oklahoma native will be making his first ARCA Racing Series start of 2017 after finding victory lane twice in five starts for Venturini last year.
Bell is ready to double down this weekend at Chicagoland and bring home victories both Thursday and Friday night. A win Friday night would help crown Bell the regular season Truck Series champion and the 15 points that go with the title would go a long way toward helping the No. 4 Tundra team double down and win both the regular season and the playoffs.
Christopher Bell, driver of the No. 4 NCWTS Toyota Tundra:
How will you approach the final race of the regular season knowing that you have a 30-point lead in the standings?
“I feel like our SiriusXm Tundra is going to be really fast – we’ve been fast at the intermediate tracks all year long and I’m confident that we will have the opportunity to get another win before the playoffs start. As far as strategy wise, I’ll leave that up to Rudy (Fugle, crew chief). I put us in a little bit of a box because I made a big mistake at Canada and it cost us a lot of points. I think we would be pretty close to having the regular season title locked up if we would’ve just finished that race where we were running all day. Now, we have to at least be mindful of the stage points and making sure that we collect as many of those as we can and not necessarily just go all out for the win. Unless you are really confident that you are going to win the race, you can’t really give up those stage points because getting the 15 bonus points that go along with the regular season title is huge to have in your pocket headed into the playoffs — especially with it carrying over into the first two rounds. On the other hand, if you can win the race and get the five bonus points for the win and then get the 15 bonus points for the regular season championship that would be really big — so it’s pretty complicated.”
Did running the ARCA race last year in advance of the truck race help you?
“I felt like running the ARCA race last year — especially being the first time I raced at Chicago in anything — allowed me to make more laps around the track and get more comfortable. Any time you can make extra laps at a track that you don’t have a lot of experience at helps a lot. There aren’t a lot of places that ARCA and the trucks are in the same weekend, but it worked out to run this race again this year, so it will be beneficial for me to get some more seat time and I think it will pay dividends on Friday night.”
Ryan “Rudy” Fugle, crew chief of the No. 4 NCWTS SiriusXM Tundra:
How will you approach the final race of the regular season knowing that you have a 30-point lead in the standings?
“It gives us a pretty good cushion that we can race for the win and not to protect the points lead. As long we don’t do anything stupid or get wrecked, we shouldn’t lose that 30-point lead. I expect us to go and use this race as good preparation for the playoffs. After having the last stretch of races at tracks that we won’t see again the rest of the year, we head to a mile-and-a-half race track -which is the type of track that makes up almost half of the playoff races. We’ve been really good at the mile-and-a-half tracks this year, so we’re ready to get back in our groove and head into the playoffs with some momentum.”
Christopher Bell’s No. 4 SiriusXM Tundra:
KBM-047: The No. 4 SiriusXM Racing team will unload KBM-047 for Friday’s NCWTS race at Chicagoland Speedway. It is the same Tundra that Kyle Busch led a race-high 32 laps with and captured the first two stages of the event at Pocono Raceway in Long Pond, Pa., before being relegated to a 25th-place finish after an accident on lap 37.
The Fugle File:
Ryan “Rudy” Fugle begins his fourth season as a crew chief at KBM and sixth overall with the organization. The New York native has guided his team to an Owner’s championship in all three of his seasons (2013, 2015 & 2016) atop the pit box at KBM, including a combined Owner’s/Driver’s Championship with Erik Jones in 2015. His drivers have combined for 20 wins, 12 poles and 41 top-five finishes across his 83 races calling the shots for the organization. Under his tutelage last season, William Byron collected a Truck Series’ rookie record seven wins while leading the No. 9 Tundra team to KBM’s fourth consecutive and fifth overall Owner’s championship.
Fugle’s NCWTS drivers have posted one win, 52 laps led, one top-five and two top-10 finishes resulting in an average finish of 12.3 across three starts in the Windy City. Kyle Busch led 52 laps en route to victory with Fugle calling the shots in the 2013 event.
