So apparently Christopher Bell will not win nearly every NASCAR Cup Series race after all.
First-year Wood Brothers Racing driver Josh Berry powered the iconic No. 21 Ford around Las Vegas Motor Speedway to break Bell’s three-race stranglehold on the sport and give an enormous boost to NASCAR’s oldest organization.
Berry now will head south to the Homestead-Miami Speedway for Sunday’s Straight Talk Wireless 400 in the season’s sixth race.
Noah Gragson appeared to be headed to his first Cup pole Saturday afternoon, but Alex Bowman topped him with a qualifying lap of 168.845 mph to claim the Busch Light Pole Award.
The Hendrick Motorsports No. 48 driver edged out Berry, who posted a lap of 168.460 mph.
Gragson, Chase Briscoe and William Byron completed the top qualifiers.
Opening as a rectangular-shaped speedway and later transformed to an oval, Homestead’s 1.5-mile layout has had a nomadic journey on NASCAR’s schedule, occupying the championship weekend as the last race for 18 straight seasons from 2002-19.
Starting the season in Florida with the Daytona 500 and coming back to close it in November in South Florida, where warmer temperatures are more likely, worked for nearly two decades, but Phoenix now hosts the capper.
Tyler Reddick is the defending winner at NASCAR’s southernmost regular venue, while Bell, Kyle Larson, Byron and Denny Hamlin have found the checkered flag in the past five visits. Homestead has produced nine different winners in the past nine races.
If you grabbed a bingo card last February and had Wood Brothers Racing victorious in a race in 2024 with lame duck driver Harrison Burton and also this season with Berry in the seat — sending the organization to the playoffs in consecutive campaigns — well by all means blot that unexpected square.
New fans of the sport may not realize the impact of the Wood Brothers, a front-running, 20th-century powerhouse and owner of 101 career NASCAR wins.
Hendrick Motorsports, Joe Gibbs Racing, Team Penske and RFK Racing all have lengthy resumes, but none of them go back 75 years and match the Stuart, Va.-based organization’s duration.
In addition to developing the modern pit stop, which it used to service Jim Clark in his 1965 Indianapolis 500 triumph, Wood Brothers Racing suited up two future champions — Dale Jarrett and Ryan Blaney — in their first Cup wins in 1991 and 2017, respectively, and is currently in alliance with Team Penske, Ford’s signature stable.
Yet Berry’s current situation is different than Burton’s last year.
The son of former driver Jeff Burton, Harrison was on his way out the door and a complete longshot winner at Daytona last summer. It was no shock when Burton made a quick exit in the postseason.
But Berry, 34, has emerged as a weekly contender: He has led 74 laps, scored consecutive top-five finishes including his maiden victory last Sunday and sits 13th in points.
“It just felt like the right fit for me,” Berry said. “But our performance at the start of the season has 100 percent exceeded my expectations. … If you’re in a good situation and surrounded by good people and have fast race cars, (you) can do amazing things.”
Beating Bell and the rest of the field in the desert was a serious lesson presented by Berry, who attended high school with music superstar Taylor Swift in Hendersonville, Tenn., a part of Nashville’s metropolitan region.
The surnames of Berry and Bell are so close alphabetically that they might have sat next to one another in a mythical homeroom had they been classmates. The reality is that with their wins in four of the first five races, they are taking the rest of NASCAR to school.
–Field Level Media
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