Justin Haley <\/strong>said after the race that a car was 1.5 seconds faster than cars with old tires. They flew.<\/p>\n\u201cObviously, it was a big deal,\u201d Bell said. \u201cwhenever they had the yellow\u2019s I could kind of restart and take off okay, but as the tires got hot, having fresher ones was the bigger advantage.\u201d<\/p>\n
A caution came out with 100 laps to go, causing the situation to present itself.<\/p>\n
If the race remained green the rest of the way and a team didn\u2019t want to take a pit stop under green that could set them two laps down at times, they\u2019d have to pit there.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t have tires,\u201d Bell said. \u201cSo, our strategy was spelled out for us. We took our last set with 100 to go. That was the only way we were going to make it on fuel, to pit there.\u201d<\/p>\n
A group of four cars stayed out, hoping a caution would come out late in the race allowing them to pit during pace laps and come out with fresher tires than the rest of the field.<\/p>\n
It worked, and a caution came out on lap 205.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey did the opposite of us, because they weren\u2019t capable of beating us heads up, and it paid off for them,\u201d Bell said.<\/p>\n
Although, Bell isn\u2019t a fan of limiting the use of tires, understandably so.<\/p>\n
He spelled it out, and even had strong words to say about Briscoe.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt sucks for a reason like that because it spells the race out for guys. For example, we have to pit [and] take our tires. All of the competitive cars decided to take their tires. Then a guy that\u2019s not going to beat us heads up decides to gamble and not take tires there and if it goes green the rest of the way, he\u2019s a lap down and a non-factor.\u201d<\/p>\n
It stunk for Bell on Saturday, but helped Briscoe win his second career Xfinity Series race\u2026<\/p>\n
And I don\u2019t think NASCAR is changing that rule any time soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Christopher Bell was dominating the U.S. Cellular 250 NASCAR Xfinity Series race at Iowa Speedway on Saturday afternoon. He had led 234 of the laps in the race with five laps to go, when he was passed by Chase Briscoe\u2019s No. 98 car that was prepped with tires 50 laps fresher than Bell\u2019s. \u201cI\u2019m just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":315,"featured_media":7139,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[661,390,644,14,126],"class_list":["post-7138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nascar","tag-chase-briscoe","tag-christopher-bell","tag-iowa-speedway","tag-nascar","tag-nascar-xfinity-series"],"modified_by":"Connor Ferguson","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/315"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7138\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}