NASCAR at Phoenix results: Christopher Bell beats Denny Hamlin in photo finish for third consecutive win

Bell becomes the first Cup Series driver to win three races in a row since 2021

By Steven Taranto

Mar 9, 2025 at 8:11 pm ET • 3 min read

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After an intense duel on a restart with two laps to go, Christopher Bell held off Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Denny Hamlin and beat him to the checkered flag in a photo finish to win the Shriners Children's 500 at Phoenix Raceway, picking up his third win in a row to begin the 2025 season. After winning at both Atlanta and Circuit of the Americas entering Phoenix, Bell becomes the first Cup Series driver to win three races in a row since the fall of 2021, when Kyle Larson won three in a row between the Charlotte Roval and Kansas.

On a day that saw cars shuffle back and forth between the front of the field based on tire strategy thanks to the availability of two different Goodyear tire compounds, Bell proved to be the common denominator up front as he led a race-high 102 laps. But a crash by Ty Gibbs with less than 10 laps to go would set up a two-lap shootout for the win between Bell, Hamlin and Larson.

With the two leaders side-by-side coming off Turn 4, Bell prevailed in the drag race back to the finish line to win by .049 seconds, the second-closest margin of victory in Phoenix history and the closest since the frontstretch was moved from what is now the back straightaway to the dogleg in 2018.

NASCAR 2025 race schedule, results: Complete list of Cup Series race dates, winners, tracks, locations

Steven Taranto

Bell was able to prevail despite the end of the race not playing out in an ideal way for him. With two available sets of red "option" tires, which offered superior grip at the beginning of a run but degraded far faster than the standard yellow "prime" tire, Bell's team opted to take option tires on their final pit stop only for a pair of cautions -- a blown engine for Ryan Blaney and Gibbs' crash -- to come out at the end of long green-flag runs.

"Whenever you're sitting there dreaming it up, that's about as ugly as it gets," Bell told Fox Sports. "You put the red tires on and you're like, 'alright, what I don't want to happen is go like 20-30 laps and get a yellow. Then that happened. Then we went like 10 more laps, we had another yellow, and it was all about who could get clear on the restart.

"Neither of us could, and we were just racing really, really hard there coming to the line. ... Wooo! JGR ran 1-2, how 'bout that!?"

THREE WINS IN A ROW FOR CHRISTOPHER BELL! What a finish. pic.twitter.com/4io4UIO91s
— FOX: NASCAR (@NASCARONFOX) March 9, 2025

As the choice between prime and option tires placed an emphasis on strategy, the field ended up having a great number of opportunities to come to pit road to choose when to put on their option sets. The yellow flag flew 10 times in total, including on Lap 99 for an 11-car pileup on the backstretch that began when Chase Briscoe and Justin Haley made wheel-to-wheel contact racing each other on a restart. The ensuing crash took out Briscoe, Haley, Carson Hocevar, Riley Herbst, Cole Custer, Shane van Gisbergen and Brad Keselowski.

Two cautions were the result of Katherine Legge, who in making her Cup Series debut became the first woman driver to compete in a Cup race since Danica Patrick in 2018. After a harmless self-spin off Turn 2 in the opening laps, Legge had bigger problems when she committed a driver error trying to yield to the leaders as lapped traffic, sliding into Josh Berry and spinning out in an accident that took out Daniel Suarez who had been running inside the top 10. Legge would fail to make it to the checkered flag and finish 30th.

After winning three in a row following the Daytona 500, Bell will now try to become the first driver to win four races in a row since Jimmie Johnson won four in a row late in the 2007 season en route to the Cup championship. He can also become the first driver to win four of the first five races since 1992, when Bill Elliott earned four wins in a row following Davey Allison's win in the Daytona 500.