No one can escape the Las Vegas curse, and Christopher Bell knows it all too well. The Pennzoil 400 initially looked like the perfect stage for the No. 20 team after running near the front early on. But as the race slipped into its closing laps, the script flipped. Instead of celebrating a breakthrough, Bell was left replaying the small moments that slipped away. Once it was all over, he took the blame for his own misstep and accepted his fate somehow.

“I don’t really know,” Christopher Bell said post-race. “Other than myself driving, I just needed to be able to win the restarts and control the race, and I just didn’t execute behind the wheel. I thought our interstate batteries in the Camry were, you know, plenty good at times to go out there and lead and, you know, control the race obviously stage one was really good…, just We’re at our worst at the end, which was a bummer but overall, you know, to get out of here with two solid stages and a good finish.”

Bell’s near-miss also added another chapter to one of Las Vegas Motor Speedway’s strangest statistical quirks. In 36 cup races at the track, the driver who leads the opening lap has never gone on to win the race.

The Joe Gibbs Racing driver unknowingly stepped right into that streak when he led the first lap after starting on the pole. Despite remaining a factor for much of the afternoon and finishing with a respectable fourth-place finish, the bizarre Las Vegas trend lived on yet again.

For much of the race, the 31-year-old driver looked capable of breaking it. He kept his No. 20 Toyota near the front through the opening stage, even capturing the Stage 1 win as he chased down his teammate and early leader Denny Hamlin during a long green flag run.

As the race settled into its rhythm, Bell remained firmly in the mix, often running inside the top three while the lead shuffled between drivers like Hamlin, Kyle Larson, and William Byron.

The final stage, however, gradually slipped away from him. After a cycle of pit stops around lap 214 and a restart with 50 laps remaining, Bell restarted near the front but couldn’t quite match Hamlin’s pace in clean air. As the laps ticked down, the No. 20 car hovered around the edge of the top three while Hamlin slowly stretched his advantage out front.

By the closing stretch, the battle for the win had narrowed down. With 10 laps remaining, Hamlin let the field ahead of Chase Elliott and Byron while Bell ran fourth with teammate Ty Gibbs behind him.

Hamlin continued to manage the gap in the closing laps, leading by roughly half a second with two laps to go before finally taking the checkered flag.

However, Bell’s result was solid on paper but still left the feeling that more could have been possible. On a day where he started from pole, led early, and collected a stage when the speed was clearly there, but at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, where even the smallest margins matter, execution in the closing runs made all the differenceand the track’s peculiar opening lap course remained unbroken.

But Bell isn’t alone on this curse. His teammate, Chase Briscoe, faced a different type of jinx at the Pennzoil 400.

Chase Briscoe jinxes speeding penalty at Las Vegas

Sometimes a joke comes back around in the worst way possible. Ahead of the Pennzoil 400, Chase Briscoe shared on Instagram that he had been pulled over for speeding off track earlier in the day, posting, “Hopefully my only time getting a speeding penalty today 😂.”

At the time, it felt like a lighthearted pre-race moment, but the comment soon turned painfully ironic once the race began at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

Trouble arrived during the first round of green flag pit stops. Around lap 36, Briscoe was flagged for speeding on pit road and was forced to serve a penalty that dropped the No. 19 Toyota down the order while drivers like Denny Hamlin, Christopher Bell, and Kyle Larson battled near the front.

Later in the race, the situation worsened when Briscoe was caught speeding on pit road again, handing the team a second costly penalty that eventually left him a lap behind the leaders. Even as the closing labs approached and the fight for the win intensified, the 32-year-old was left trying to recover from the earlier setback.

However, Briscoe managed to recover and entered the top 10 with 40 laps to go and ultimately settled for a P8 finish while defying all odds.