Joe Gibbs Racing Driver Cleared to Race at Pocono Despite Broken Wrist
What’s Happening? Christopher Bell will race in this weekend’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Pocono Raceway despite injuries suffered in a…
NASCAR officials revealed that Christopher Bell’s hard crash at Michigan International Speedway was one of the hardest hits in recent NASCAR history.
Sunday’s race at Michigan International Speedway was one of the most memorable races of the 2026 season so far.
The race included plenty of excitement, a packed crowd, and an emotional win for Denny Hamlin, as he tied Kyle Busch on the all-time NASCAR Cup Series wins list.
Still, this almost perfect afternoon did have a scary moment, when Chase Elliott snapped loose in turns three and four, hitting Christopher Bell and sending the No. 20 into the outside wall hard.
While Bell was quick to get out of the car, fans and industry members agreed that this was one of the worst wrecks in recent NASCAR history, something NASCAR Managing Director of Racing Communications Mike Forde proved was no mere speculation.
During this week’s episode of NASCAR’s Hauler Talk podcast, Forde said that, according to other NASCAR officials, such as Managing Director of Safety Systems Matt Harper, the crash was the hardest of the NASCAR Next Gen era and one of the hardest of the past decade.
“He [Harper] did confirm that this was the largest hit we have seen in the Next Gen era. So that’s 2022 on. . . so four years and counting, and he said it was also the hardest hit that he’s seen, [he] has looked at from a data perspective, since he’s been here, and he’s been here since 2015.” — Mike Forde
This means that the hit is definitely harder than Ryan Blaney’s scary head-first crash at Daytona during the fall of 2023, Bell’s own crash at Talladega last spring, and maybe even Bubba Wallace’s hard hit at Pocono in 2018.
Forde explained that the hit was measured in terms of Delta V, or as Forde puts it, “the measure of speed lost in an incident.”
“If you’re going 200 miles an hour, and then all of a sudden, you come to a stop because you hit a wall, and you scrub off X amount of speed,” Forde said. ”That delta, that difference, is what the Delta V is. So, say you hit a wall at 200. . . and then you slow down to 150 miles an hour. The Delta V there will be 50.”
For proprietary reasons, Forde could not share the exact Delta V for Bell’s hit. With speeds just shy of 195 MPH in the corners at Michigan, it’s easy to see the massive difference from such a hard collision.
While Bell took quite a hit, fans and industry members were glad to see the Oklahoma native climb out of his car just moments after the hit.
One person who seemed especially stricken by Bell’s crash was Prime Video analyst Dale Earnhardt Jr., whom many fans in online circles said seemed to be shaken up in the aftermath of the crash.
During his own podcast episode, Earnhardt, a veteran fan and driver, shared that he has never seen a hit that hard in NASCAR.
Still, Bell didn’t come out uninjured, as on Wednesday afternoon, Joe Gibbs Racing announced that Bell had broken his wrist in that crash. Even then, Bell is cleared to race on Sunday at Pocono and seems to have no plans of stepping out of the car during the race.
What’s Happening? Christopher Bell will race in this weekend’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Pocono Raceway despite injuries suffered in a…
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