Christopher Bell Wins On The Dirt at Bristol (4-9-23)

By: Becca Cottingham Quimby

Headline Photo Credit: USA Today

We head to Bristol for the dirt race of the season. Kyle Larson will lead us to green and gets a good lead out in front of everyone. The grills are already collecting plenty of dirt. It isn’t long before we get a caution as well as a push for the lead by Austin Dillion. Bubba Wallace started to lose his rear and Joey Logano got into the back of Bubba after being tapped in the rear and that collected two other drivers. We get this chosen drone for the race. They go four wide entering in the corners. Matt Crafton will spin out and bring out caution number two as we just hit the halfway point of stage one. We have teammates battling each other for second and third. We get another caution as Brad Keselowski goes around. When we get back to racing Austin Dillion and Kyle Busch go back to battling one another for second place. Middle of the pack we are seeing most drivers being three wide. This could be very dangerous as it will not take much for someone to spin out on the dirt. Denny Hamlin and Josh Berry make contact and that is all it takes to cause a mess and brings us under caution once again. Kyle Larson will win stage one under caution.

This leads us to non-competitive pitstops as the main pit crews are at home. They have the engineering team with them for Bristol. Four drivers did stay out on the pitstop to make up ground. They will take over the first four positions when we go back to racing. The start of stage two has teammates at twenty-three XI nose to tail on the restart. Kyle Larson and Ryan Preece make some hard contact. It was just shortly afterward and we see a caution for Jonathan Davenport. We just do get back to racing and Michael McDowell does a complete three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn avoiding everyone. Ryan Preece also made sure to make contact back with Kyle Larson. We hardly get back to racing and we see so much happening between Joey Logano, Michael McDowell, and AJ Allmendinger. NASCAR decided to not call a caution. Ryan Preece by himself then goes around and brings out a caution. This was not the only caution we will see a few more incidents. Tyler Reddick will keep the lead and will go on the won stage two.

We had several drivers opt to stay out again with the end of stage two into stage three. Kyle Larson spins out and brings out the tenth caution flag of the night. It almost looked like Denny Hamlin was going to bring out the caution, but it stayed green. However, Ryan Preece and Kyle Larson made contact again with Kyle being put into the wall. He then gets spun around again off the front of another car. This appears to take Kyle Larson out of the race. Christopher Bell got another commanding lead. The big race is between Tyler Reddick and Chase Briscoe. Kyle Busch will bring out the thirteenth caution of the race with just under twenty laps to go. We have Ryan Blaney spin and miss everyone but he goes from the front to the rear quickly. We get a caution after the white flag shows and Christopher Bell becomes the unofficial winner.