Christopher Bell and his No. 4 JBL Tundra team are ready to shake off a rough finish to last week’s season-opening event at Daytona (Fla.) International Speedway and get things turned in the right direction in Saturday’s Great Clips 200 at Atlanta Motor Speedway in Hampton, Ga.
Bell along with his Kyle Busch Motorsports (KBM) teammates, William Byron and Cody Coughlin, traveled to Atlanta for a two-day rookie test the first week of February. Crew chief Jerry Baxter estimated that his team logged over 400 miles on the 1.54-mile Quad-oval, which allowed his young driver to get accustomed to a variety of setups and experiment driving a variety of lines around the challenging track. It was also an opportunity for the 21-year-old driver to get acclimated with Baxter and the rest of the No. 4 JBL crew after working with the No. 54 crew for six of his seven races last season.
The team will be unloading a Tundra that is a proven winner for this weekend’s event in Georgia. KBM-29 has visited victory lane twice in four career starts and has never finished outside the top 10. Owner-driver Kyle Busch led 53 of 69 laps en route to victory with the Toyota in his 2015 Truck Series debut at Pocono (Pa.) Raceway and followed it up in the series’ next stop by leading 44 of 100 laps and ending in victory lane at Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn.
Across its first six seasons in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series, KBM tallied 45 wins and four Owner’s championships. One thing they were not able to accomplish is finding victory lane at Atlanta. The 1.54-mile Quad Oval is the lone circuit on the current schedule, which consists of 21 different tracks, that the premiere team in NASCAR’s third division has yet to conquer. Busch came close for his team twice, posting runner-up finishes in the 2010 and 2012 events, and overall the team has recorded an average finish of 8.5 across eight starts, but victory has eluded them.
With lessons learned from a recent two-day test in the Peach State in his memory bank and a Tundra with a winning history underneath him, Bell is ready to ring up KBM’s first Atlanta win on Saturday.
KBM PR
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