“We broke the curse!” Christopher Bell shouted post-race. The Next-Gen jinx is toast as Bell becomes the first driver to win three consecutive races in a Next-Gen car. He is on fire! The Joe Gibbs Racing star beat teammate Denny Hamlin by a razor-thin 0.049 seconds in the Shriners Children’s 500. The last driver to win three straight was Kyler Larson in 2021. Any guesses who won the championship that year? That’s right! It was Larson.

What makes Bell’s run all the more jaw-dropping is his versatility across tracks he has won at. It started at a superspeedway (Atlanta), then a road course (COTA), followed by a mile-long oval at Phoenix. The No. 20 team is clicking like never before. So, is Bell on the fast track to NASCAR glory? NASCAR insider Jordan Bianchi shared his thoughts on Bell’s early season dominance.

Christopher Bell’s 3 peat is not a fluke

Christopher Bell credits his crew chief, Adam Stevens, for this surge. Back in 2021, when Bell joined JGR, Stevens planted the seed. “We’re sitting in his office at JGR,” Bell recalled. “He looked at me and said, ‘We can do this.’ He’d won three straight with Kyle Busch before, and he knew we could too.” It took a while, but Stevens’ belief paid off big time. Notably, when Stevens won three in a row with Kyle Busch back in 2015, he did it en route to a championship!

Jordan Bianchi shared his take on Bell and didn’t mince his words on the #20’s greatness: “I do think you have to recalibrate how you look at a great season. I’ve been standing on the Christopher Bell soapbox for so long now, and I’ve said he’s going to win, he’s going to do all these great things, and I think he will, and we’re seeing it. He’s having this breakout year. But we’ll know after race 26 of the regular season, where he’s at in terms of wins, laps led, average, all the important stuff.”

For a long time, Christopher Bell was just looked at as another JGR driver along with the centerpiece, Denny Hamlin. However, his results over the last three years have shown that he is way more than that. And in 2025, he has finally broken out to be the star that everyone expected him to be. Despite missing out on the Championship 4 last year after the entire Martinsville race manipulation fiasco, Bell made it the two previous years. While his teammate, Denny Hamlin, didn’t!

However, Bianchi believes that Bell’s true greatness will be in how he finishes off the regular season. “Where did he finish in regular season points? That, to me, is going to be a better marker to really gauge how great that year is. And I think we’ve had this conversation. I think you and I both are kind of in the same ballpark, I think, going forward, too. I think people need to start really appreciating winning the regular season championship and what that means.” 

Out of all the regular season champions so far (2017-present), only three of them have gone on to win the championship. Kyle Larson in 2021, Kyle Busch in 2019, and Martin Truex Jr. in 2017. If Bell manages to keep up such stellar performances, the regular season championship is a given, and with that comes additional playoff points, only strengthening his chance at the title. And just to make things better, Kyle Busch won in 2019, too, with Bell’s current crew chief, Adam Stevens.

This rise in performance isn’t just luck. The Next-Gen car’s tricky aerodynamics and single-source parts have leveled the field since 2022, making repeat wins rare. Just look at 2024: No driver won back-to-back races all year. Meanwhile, his Toyota teammate Denny Hamlin has been solid too—sixth at Atlanta, second at Phoenix, despite joking, “There’s nobody I hate seeing win more than my teammate.” Joe Gibbs Racing clearly has something cooking under the hoods of these Toyotas, and the rest of the grid can only sit and watch as they dominate.

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Christopher Bell is finally living his dream

Back in 2021, Christopher Bell wasn’t so sure he’d make it this far with JGR. In 2020, Bell’s rookie Cup gig with Leavine Family Racing fell apart when the team sold out. Enter Joe Gibbs, who’d seen Bell shine in the Xfinity Series with a fourth in 2018 and third in 2019. Outside of NASCAR, Bell was already a three-time Chili Bowl Nationals champion (2017, 2018, and 2019), highlighting his versatility as a driver.

Gibbs picked him over Erik Jones for the No. 20 ride in 2021. Bell knew it was a sink-or-swim scenario for him. After his first Cup win at Daytona’s road course that year, he told USA Today, “I knew going to Joe Gibbs Racing that this is my time. I’m either going to put up or shut up.” He added, “I just want so bad to be in this No. 20 car for the rest of my career. I need to perform well to do that.”

Fast forward to Phoenix 2025, Bell’s finally delivering now and has toppled multiple NASCAR records on his way to glory. As the season progresses, we will get to see more of how the #20 deals with setbacks that are out of his control. But for now, everything seems to be going his way, and he is lapping up all these opportunities like no one has ever seen before.

What do you think? Will Christopher Bell be the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series Champion? Or is it simply too soon to call? Let us know in the comments!