Christopher Bell reacts to crew chief Adam Stevens injuring both knees

During the two-week break in the NASCAR schedule, Christopher Bell lost his crew chief to a double knee injury. Adam Stevens will work remotely for today’s race after having surgery on both of his knees as a result of those injuries.

Chris Sherwood will be the crew chief for Christopher Bell while Adam Stevens is sidelined. Still, Bell is in the middle of a three-win season (so far) and poised to make another playoff run. It isn’t the ideal time to lose his crew chief to injury.

Bell spoke with Davey Segal of SiriusXM NASCAR Radio about the change.

“He [Adam Stevens] sent a group message to our entire team, we’ve got a group chat going, and it was on, it might have been on Sunday evening,” Bell told Segal. “The evening that he broke his leg, both of his knees I should say. So, he said, ‘Hey guys, I tore my patellar tendons and I’m going to be out for a little bit.’ So, yeah, that was some news that we weren’t expecting to get for sure.”

It is more or less going to be business as usual, but the voice in Bell’s ear will be different. Stevens will be doing all he can to do his job as normal from the JGR shop.

“I think it’ll be fine as long as we don’t have any technical difficulties communicating back to Charlotte,” Bell continued. “You know, he’s going to be at the war room in Huntersville at Joe Gibbs Racing. As long as we don’t have technical difficulties, I don’t think I’ll be able to tell much of a difference.”

Christopher Bell has worked with Chris Sherwood in the past. That will likely help this transition go smoothly for as long as Stevens is out.

“All my communication will be through Sherwood. I’m very comfortable with him. I’ve been working with him since my Xfinity days back in 2018 and 19, so yeah, I think it should be fine.”

This season, Christopher Bell has won three races. It is his best regular season in the Cup Series. In the last two years, Bell has made huge runs in the postseason to make the Championship 4.

While there has been lots of success, there have been issues as well. JGR as a whole has had sketchy engine issues all summer long. Ty Gibbs has dealt with it the most, but it could be any of the four Gibbs drivers to have a failure. That’s how frequent these mechanical issues have been.