A miracle that he walked away relatively unscathed.
Michigan International Speedway consistently delivers some of the highest speeds of any track on the NASCAR Cup Series schedule. At two miles long, Michigan is one of only three oval tracks on the circuit that are at least two miles long, and unlike Daytona and Talladega, NASCAR doesn’t restrict the cars to reduce speeds for safety reasons. That consistently leads to speeds over 200 mph at Michigan, which can result in some massive crashes when things go wrong.
Unfortunately for Christopher Bell, he was one of those who took a hard hit this past weekend during the FireKeepers Casino 400. In fact, not only was it a hard hit, it was one of the hardest hits ever recorded in NASCAR.
The crash came on lap 149, when Bell was racing alongside Chase Elliott. Going into turn 3, Elliott was on the inside of Bell when his #9 car broke loose on the bottom and turned him into Bell, sending the #20 car hard into the outside wall.
Obviously the hard hit had other drivers concerned for Bell and Elliott:
But luckily, both drivers were quickly able to get out of the car and walk away from the scary crash.
There was concern, however, that Bell might be forced to miss this weekend’s race at Pocono after his team owner Joe Gibbs announced after the race that his driver was dealing with wrist and ankle injuries, and Bell was spotted wearing a cast as he was leaving the track. But yesterday it was announced that Bell would indeed be behind the wheel this weekend, despite suffering a fractured left wrist in the violent wreck.
As it turns out though, it’s nothing short of a miracle that Bell’s injuries weren’t any worse – because his crash was the hardest hit in NASCAR in at least a decade.
During his Hauler Talk podcast, NASCAR vice president of communications Mike Forde said that the crash was the hardest impact in the Next Gen era, which started in 2022, and the hardest since NASCAR managing director of safety systems Matt Harper joined the sport and began collecting data in 2015.
As Forde explained, NASCAR measures the impact based on a change in velocity during a hit:
“Delta-v is the measure of speed lost in an incident. So if you’re going 200 mph and then all of a sudden you come to a stop because you hit a wall and scrub off X amount of speed, that difference is what the Delta-v is. I can’t give out the Delta-v number for Bell. That data is proprietary in a way. We share that with the team and the driver, and that’s their data to do with what they want. But we can confirm that it was the largest number we’ve seen in the Next Gen era.”
Absolutely insane – but also a testament to how far NASCAR has come in terms of driver safety. For Bell to walk away with only a fractured wrist just shows how safe the cars are, even in such a violent crash.
