Victory Bell's and Hail Melon's; NASCAR sets championship four lineup in crazy fashion

NASCAR’s championship four is set after 500 chaotic laps around the 0.5 mile short track in the Appalachian Mountains in Martinsville, Va., Sunday afternoon, as Chase Elliott, Joey Logano, Ross Chastain, and Christopher Bell will compete for the 2022 NASCAR Cup Series championship. What wasn’t expected was the chaos that surrounded the final laps of the second to last race of the season.

Coming into this weekend, Bell was in a must win scenario to advance to the final four round after a 34th place finish in Las Vegas two weeks ago, and an 11th place finish at Miami last Sunday afternoon. He would lead 150 of the 500 laps during the Xfinity 500 this past Sunday to clinch his way into the next round, like he had previously done at the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval course when he won to stay in contention.

“It's just been a roller coaster of emotions for sure,” quoted Bell when he talked to the media after the race. “I think I’ve been praying off-season for two out of the last four weeks, now I’m ready to race again. I don’t know, like no matter what’s going on behind the scenes, whenever you get in the car, you can’t let that bother you. They gave me a great race car today, the fastest car today. At the Charlotte road course when we needed to win, it worked out for us.”

That wasn’t even the craziest part of the race, as Ross Chastain scored several new fans and a spot in the championship fight after his crazy move on the final lap, Chastain, who was two points down when he took the white flag, needed to pass two more cars to win a tiebreaker over three time Daytona 500 winner Denny Hamlin to move on to the next round. When Chastain was too far behind to pass Hamlin, Chastain rode the outside wall and slammed on the gas, as he used this to go 60 mph faster than everyone else and pass five cars in turns three and four to move on to the Championship Four round, moving from 10th place to a top five finish.

When NBC showed the replay of this fantastic move, the speed Chastain showed was like no one had ever seen at the paperclip style racetrack. Chastain’s final lap was two seconds faster than everyone else on the track at a time of 18.845 seconds and an average speed of100.483 mph, making it the fastest lap at Martinsville Speedway in a NASCAR Stock Car.

“I think the first time I ever saw a race car do that was on a video game, the GameCube 2005 console,” quoted Chastain talking about where he came up with the thrilling move. “I don’t know if anybody else in the world had those. My brother Chad beat me doing it at the fictitious I think it was Dodge Raceway somewhere in a fake city, somewhere in Florida.”

Chastain, still talking about the last lap dash for a chance to win a championship, told the media, “I never thought about it. Our prep this week, it never crosses my mind. I’ve done a lot of sim work this week, a lot of iRacing, a lot of stuff, laps here virtually. Never once did it cross my mind or ever try it. I want to make that clear. The last time would have been a long time ago before I was even thinking about being a NASCAR driver. It flashed back in my head on the white flag, and I double-checked off of two. Like, through one and two I thought, I think we need two spots. They said, Yes. If it wrecks, okay, we don't make it. It might not work, but I’ll try it.”

Next week, Chastain, Bell, Elliott, and Logano will battle for 312 laps around the one mile Phoenix Raceway in Avondale, Ariz., to determine who the 2022 NASCAR Cup Series champion will be. The 500 Km race will start at 2 p.m. Central, and will be carried live on NBC, MRN, and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.