Bass Pro Shops Night Race: Bell steals Bristol win, JGR sweeps Round of 16

BRISTOL, Tenn. — Although Christopher Bell was not the most dominant Joe Gibbs Racing driver Saturday night at Bristol Motor Speedway, he was in the right place at the right time to break through and get his fourth NASCAR Cup Series win of the 2025 season and first on the “Thunder Valley” concrete.

Bell only led 12 laps, compared to his JGR teammates who led a combined 331 laps with Ty Gibbs (201), Chase Briscoe (137) and Denny Hamlin (3), but an excellent strategy call to stay out longer than most and then pit for fresh Goodyear tires later on made the difference for the No. 20 DEWALT team.

“Well, I’ll tell you what, I was nervous on the twos,” Bell said. “I didn’t know if I wanted to be on the bottom or the top, and whenever Brad (Keselowski) picked the top, he didn’t really give me an option. I had to pick the bottom. All night long, I don’t know, old tires just really, really pushed up in the middle of the corners, so I was hoping that those guys on old tires would push up, and they did. They did, and I was able to get by or get underneath them. It wasn’t pretty there at the end, but we got her done.”

When asked about how his team rallied, Bell replied, “We just know that any week, any given week, it could be us, and it hadn’t been us for a long time. But Bristol, baby, tonight it’s us!”

With Bell winning at Bristol, JGR swept the Round of 16 after Briscoe won at Darlington and Hamlin took the victory last weekend at Gateway.

RFK Racing’s Brad Keselowski was so close to finding Victory Lane for the first time since last year’s Darlington spring race. His No. 6 Castrol/Travel Centers of America Ford team made a strategy call on the long green-flag run that almost played into their favor before a late-race caution came out.

This runner-up finish was Keselowski’s eighth in the Next Gen era, as RFK will have to wait another week before trying to break into Victory Lane for the first time in 2025.

“Jeremy Bullins, my crew chief, played the strategy really well,” Keselowski said. “We did all the things we needed to do to be in position and was really happy with where we were for the last restart. The 77 didn’t get a good launch and then the 38 missed the corner and cleared him up and the bottom lane took off. It was a 50/50 shot and, like everything else, got the wrong one.”

Front Row Motorsports’ Zane Smith had one of the best performances in his Cup Series career as the 26-year-old driver earned eight stage points and 42 total points as he went on to finish third after leading five laps.

“Hats off to this whole group at FRM,” Smith said. “It’s kind of a home race for our team owner, Bob Jenkins, and it was really cool to have a couple Fords up there battling for it. I could just taste it, but it was crazy there on old tires and a few things just didn’t quite play out.”

Team Penske’s Ryan Blaney finished fourth after winning Stage 1 and finishing second in Stage 2. Blaney’s 52 points earned were the most of any driver at Bristol.

“It was another one of those things where we thought we knew what the tire was gonna do and it did something completely different,” Blaney said. “I guess that’s happened multiple times and that makes for an exciting race and trying to figure it out on the fly and what to expect what to do and how to strategize and all that stuff. It was a wild night. I wish we wouldn’t have run so many laps under caution.

“The middle part of that race, two thirds of that race was kind of getting pretty boring, but we were really fast all night. It’s nice to win a stage and good to come home fourth. Overall, I’m really, really proud of the night and the effort. We’ll go on to Loudon next week. I’m looking forward to it.”

Results from the 2025 Bass Pro Shops Night Race at Bristol Motor Speedway are listed below:

Tires Management Chaos

After an uneventful Bristol spring race that saw Kyle Larson lead 411 of 500 laps with very little passing, Goodyear and NASCAR decided to switch things up for the fall race. Although there was little to no tire falloff during practice, the race was a completely different story.

Some drivers were running just 35 to 40 laps before their tires began cording, which caused them to fall seconds off the pace.

The tire falloff was so extreme that Goodyear released another set to the teams during the final stage. If they did not release another set, the teams would have run out of tires before the end of the race.

Other Race Facts

The 2025 Bass Pro Shops Night Race at Bristol Motor Speedway had 137 of 500 laps run under caution (27.4%). In the modern era of the NASCAR Cup Series, there had never been a race where 137 laps were run under caution until the 2025 Bristol fall race.

AJ Allmendinger started on pole for the first time since Watkins Glen 10 years ago in 2015 and he led 24 laps. Allmendinger also earned the Xfinity Fastest Lap (15.549 seconds), which makes it the second consecutive Bristol race where he earned the fastest lap of the race (15.38 seconds in the 2025 spring race).

Christopher Bell has now finished inside the top 10 at every Bristol concrete race in the Next Gen Era. He has also scored stage points in 12 straight stages in “Thundey Valley.” The last time he did not score a stage point at Bristol was in Stage 2 in 2020 while driving the No. 95 for Leavine Family Racing.

Ty Gibbs had a career-high 201 laps at Bristol. Now, he has the second-most laps led without a victory in the Cup Series. After winning Stage 2, Gibbs scored his third career stage win, with all three coming at Bristol.

23XI Racing driver and Craftsman Truck Series phenom Corey Heim made his fourth start in the Cup Series in 2025. Heim went on to finish sixth in just his seventh career Cup race. Heim now has more top-10 finishes (one) and top-15 finishes (two) than his 23XI teammate Riley Herbst, who has no top 10s or top 15s.

“Yeah, a good result there,” Heim said. “Once everyone kind of realized the situation with the tires, we adjusted accordingly and did all of the right things and kept ourselves in it all day. It was a claw to get back on the lead lap after we had a right front go down in Stage 1, but can’t thank these 23XI Racing guys enough — they stuck with it. Thank you to Toyota and Robinhood for all of the support that went into my five Cup races this year. All the ups and downs that we had — to end on a high note is pretty special. Hopefully, we can take that and move forward.”

Kyle Larson, who came into the race with six straight top-five finishes at Bristol, had his worst race at the track since 2016. Larson finished 32nd, which was his third-worst finish in 19 career races at the Tennessee track, while missing out on stage points here for the first time since 2019.

Joe Gibbs Racing swept the first three Cup Series playoff races in the Round of 16. This marks the first time since the third round of the 2021 playoffs (Hendrick Motorsports) that a team has swept a playoff round.

Alex Bowman, Austin Dillon, Shane van Gisbergen and Josh Berry were all eliminated from the Cup Series Playoffs.

Berry had the worst round of them all, scoring just three points in his last three races after finishing 38th at Darlington, 36th at Gateway and 39th at Bristol. In 2019, Erik Jones was the only other Cup Series playoff driver to start the postseason with three straight finishes of 35th or worse.

GRID RANKING