Bells fast becoming NASCAR’s next power couple in ‘Full Speed’ Season 2

MOORESVILLE, N.C. — Christopher and Morgan Bell are too young to grasp the reference, but they are reveling in a NASCAR home version of “The Newlywed Game” on their beige sectional couch.

Each armed with a dry-erase whiteboard and marker, the Bells, who have become one of the most high-profile couples in the Cup Series since last year, are trading goofy wisecracks, gentle compliments and playful jabs like everyday husband-wife duos once did on a nationally televised game show.

And their competitive fire is as evident as on Sundays when Christopher Bell is winning races in the No. 20 Toyota with the demonstrative and fervent support of his wife, Morgan, atop the pit box.

As their now-famed Poochon, Sadie, dozes between them, the Bells joust over who knows more about the others’ favorite school subjects, coffee orders and social media platforms.

“That was good,” Christopher says despite being trounced by Morgan (who knows much more than her husband about their ideal date nights, dance moves and musical artists). “Hopefully, this is good content.”

The Joe Gibbs Racing star would know, having become an unwitting king of NASCAR content while emerging as a perennial championship contender the past three seasons.

Last year, Christopher and Morgan unexpectedly were thrust into the first season of the Full Speed docuseries.

They have starring roles in Season 2 that was released on Netflix last week, bolstering a public image that has expanded this season.

During Christopher’s three-race winning streak at Atlanta, Circuit of The Americas and Phoenix, the FOX Sports cameras often lingered on Morgan, whose emotional and tense expressions and gestures reflected the dramatics.

Meet the Bells, NASCAR’s new power couple — but a very reluctant one at that.

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“I won’t watch this, just so you know,” Christopher explains while being interviewed about being prominently featured in Full Speed. “I did not watch Full Speed 1. I will not watch Full Speed 2.

“I don’t watch my own interviews. I don’t know why. Morgan tries to get me to watch, and I’ll spend time watching with her, but it’s never something that I would pick to watch.”

Morgan got Christopher to submit to viewing some of the first season but concedes he never would binge-watch his Netflix appearances, much less even consume snippets on Instagram.

“That’s something that he doesn’t do,” she said. “Like even if you are scrolling social media and there’s his interview from post-race on your phone, he’s going to either walk out of the room or turn the phone off.

He just doesn’t want to watch or hear himself in his own interviews.”

Of course, it isn’t quite so comfortable, either, for Morgan, who now occupies an omnipresent role formerly played by famous NASCAR wives such as Kim Burton and DeLana Harvick.

“Kind of interesting or odd, I guess,” Morgan said about her late-race cameos on national TV. “I don’t know.

I guess I hope it never comes across like bad or weird, but there’s been very, very, very few races that I’ve missed, and nine times out of 10, I’m going to sit right there where you always see me from start to finish.

“That’s just … it’s our whole life. So, I don’t know how you couldn’t be completely immersed in what we do.”

The Bells have grown accustomed to making some of their private life public and view the tradeoff as worth it for spreading the gospel of NASCAR and motorsports.

But it’s still awkward.

“It always felt like a better idea until you got in the moment, and then whenever their cameras are on, it’s just hard to open up and to be not guarded,” Christopher, 30, said.

“It gets easier with time, but it still is just very uncomfortable and a skillset that you have to acquire for sure to just ignore the cameras.

Whenever you’re watching any sort of TV show, you want it to be normal, but it’s just not normal. Everything that you do is somewhat staged.

It’s very difficult to feel like just completely yourself whenever the cameras are on.

“But I think it’s important to showcase our sport.

And hopefully if Full Speed does anything, it educates the general population a little bit more.

It takes education to understand, ‘Hey, these guys aren’t just hitting the cruise button on the highway and making laps.’ There’s more to it.”

Said Morgan, 29: “It’s definitely even harder for him just because he loves to keep to himself and would rather people know nothing about him other than the fact that he races for JGR in the 20 car.”

James Gilbert | Getty Images

Christopher and Morgan first met as teenagers in 2010 at an Ohio dirt track through a mutual friend who raced online with Christopher.

Hailing from a Norman, Oklahoma, family with no racing background, Christopher was living mostly in Ohio while trying to break into the sprint car scene.

Meanwhile, Morgan Kemenah’s family was fully immersed in the motorsports culture of middle Ohio.

Her father, Brian, and uncle Chad were part of numerous championship teams.

“There was always a race car in our garage,” Morgan said. “So that’s what I did every weekend. I went to the dirt track.”

Bell hardly needed an introduction.

“She comes from a very, very heavy motorsports family,” he said. “Her dad is a Hall of Fame sprint car crew chief, and her uncle is a Hall of Fame driver.”

Christopher and Morgan began dating in 2014 during the same summer the former cheerleader was named Queen of the Knoxville Nationals between her junior and senior years at Old Fort High School.

Their first date came when Christopher invited Morgan to a race in Bloomington, Indiana, that was closest to the Kemenah family home in Burgoon, Ohio.

“I was like, ‘You should come to Indiana Midget Week, it’s a big deal,’ ” he said. “Come hang out with me.”

It wasn’t without first-date drama. Christopher crashed the prior night at a track in Greencastle “and was probably slightly concussed” when he met Morgan and her mother, Stacy (who was persuaded by her daughter to drive them to Bloomington).

“He’s like, ‘I have this like horrible headache,’ and my mom was like, ‘Oh, do you want some Advil?’ and he says, ‘Sure,’ ” Morgan recalled with a laugh.

“And then he thought my mom was trying to poison him because technically the bottle says take two, but she’s like, ‘Was your headache really bad? Then I would take four.’ “

Christopher took Stacy’s advice and then the checkered flag several hours later to kick off a whirlwind romance.

Morgan would skip her senior prom for an Eldora Speedway race (which Bell didn’t win). The week after her high school graduation in 2015, she watched Christopher race on Memorial Day in Lawrenceburg, Indiana.

The next day, she and Christopher flew to Charlotte, North Carolina, as he began his pavement career in Late Models.

They crashed on an air mattress in the spare bedroom of a friend’s apartment for a couple of weeks. Future JGR teammate Chase Briscoe slept on a couch in an adjoining room.

The move away from dirt in pursuit of NASCAR was jarring for Morgan.

“She used to get so mad at me whenever I first started running asphalt,” Christopher said. “She grew up sprint car racing. She was confused.

I was a dirt track racer running USAC midget cars full time, and so I think she expected me to go to sprint cars.”

Said Morgan: “Most dirt racers’ dream is to become a sprint car World of Outlaw(s) racer.

He was always like, ‘Yeah, to be a professional race car driver and make a living racing cars, you have to be an Outlaw.’ So that’s what I thought.

And honestly even before I met him, sprint cars were the only race cars that existed in my world. It was sprint cars or bust.”

A few days after their first date in Bloomington, Christopher got the call that he’d be making his Kyle Busch Motorsports debut by practicing an asphalt Late Model. He texted Morgan, who responded, “Why?”

“I was like, ‘What are we doing?’ ” she recalled.

Chris Trotman | Getty Images

Morgan was a faithful supporter a year later as Christopher made his Truck Series debut — which also marked her regular appearances on the pit box. She was there when Bell won on Eldora’s iconic dirt in his third start driving a KBM truck.

Her presence was met with initial skepticism. Toyota Racing Development executive Jack Irving, who helped manage the manufacturer’s TD2 driver development program and was a mentor to Christopher, had questions about the long-term prospects of a 20-year-old rising star and his 18-year-old traveling companion.

“Jack was just like, ‘Man, are you sure you want your girlfriend going with you to these races?’ and then after a little bit, he realized that she’s serious,” Christopher said. “She’s likely going to be my wife. I mean, it was because we were young.

Jack was like, ‘You can’t just bring a random girl.’ But no, she wasn’t a random girl.”

Morgan laughs. “It’s OK. Jack loves me now.”

She estimates having been on the pit box for all but a handful of Christopher’s 329 national series starts in NASCAR, watching virtually all in their entirety. Because of extreme heat at Texas Motor Speedway a few years ago, she retired to their infield motorhome for fear they’d both be too ill otherwise.

“If he ends up in a wreck after the race just being so hot and sick, I’m not going to be any good if I’m laying on the floor next to him exhausted from the heat,” Morgan said.

Noting that Morgan is “far more emotional than I am,” Christopher said there’s a yin and yang to their race track relationship.

Morgan helps Christopher when he’s “disgusted” with a ninth place at Texas, and Christopher helps Morgan get over the close losses that leave her on the verge of being inconsolable.

“There wasn’t a moment where I realized how into it she was,” he said. “I think it’s just we literally built this life together.

So like everything, we just took it as it came, and the deeper that we got into it, it just became both of us together.

“And literally since my dirt full-time days to my late model days to my truck days to Xfinity days and Cup days, she has lived it and gone through the trials and tribulations together.”

Considering herself a No. 20 Camry team member, Morgan enjoys coordinating race day outfits around the car’s sponsors.

She recently bought a pair of gold trousers at Target because “they’re DeWalt yellow,” which is harder to find than red (Rheem and Reser’s) and green (Interstate Batteries).

When Christopher was sponsored by JBL, she intentionally shopped for orange.

“I’m not as crazy about it anymore, but our colors now are a little more conducive to being easier to match,” she said.

Her pre-race ritual is to wish every team member well on her way from the car to the pit box because “they can have as big of an effect on our day as anything. They can win our race, and they can lose it.”

A bundle of nervous energy, she often lightly taps the shoulders of William Hartman, a No. 20 engineer, during the race.

“What’s William thinking here? ‘Get this psycho lady off the pit box,’ ” Christopher said with a laugh while watching a recent video of his wife’s excitable in-race behavior.

James Gilbert | Getty Images

Morgan goes from giggling to lightly sobbing after watching the same video, explaining that “this is what the Netflix people always get out of me.”

During Full Speed, Morgan gets emotional in multiple on-camera sitdowns and concedes the interviewers were “really good at always asking the questions that would get me hard, hard in my feels.

I would normally end up in tears, and I’ve heard they have shown that quite a few times in the show.

That’s just what it is. They filmed with us during the most stressful part of the year.”

There’s a long history of NASCAR drivers’ wives being emotionally invested while watching from the pit box.

Morgan is a little leery, though, about being compared with Kim Burton, who has been one of NASCAR’s most famous cheerleaders for three decades (initially for husband Jeff and more recently for son Harrison).

“That’s what I get scared of because sometimes I feel like people like make fun of Kim,” Morgan said. “And I will say there are times where I’m like, ‘Take a deep breath, Kim!’ but I guess there’s times she’s probably just as passionate.”

During Bell’s victory at Circuit of The Americas, FOX showed Morgan Bell and Samantha Busch in succession as they rooted on their husbands battling for the lead.

“People were like, ‘Oh yeah, the TV broadcast was basically pinning you and Samantha on each other,” Morgan said. “And I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s great!’ It looks like Sam and I are going at it or something.

I honestly didn’t even realize that they were doing that.”

During a Full Speed interview, Morgan notes “the playoffs create great things for the people who aren’t living in them,” and some of the series’ most compelling moments are at the expense of the Bells’ frayed nerves.

After the controversial finish at Martinsville, Morgan is shown angrily screaming, “Are we in or we out?” The series also revisits the 2023 championship finale as Christopher and Morgan share a tearful embrace after his exit at Phoenix. (“Hopefully this isn’t my last shot,” Christopher says softly.)

“The ups and downs of it are massive, for sure,” he said. “And we got to experience both of those.”

But there also are the everyday life moments for the Bells, who were engaged in 2018, married in February 2020 (a week before Christopher’s Daytona 500 debut) and moved into their house on Lake Norman in January 2022.

The neighbors are enthusiastic supporters of the show, which details their fandom (a No. 20 flag hangs from a nearby house on the block), their dog-sitting of Sadie and their passion for landscaping.

“That is really nice that they showcase our neighbors do care a lot about us,” Morgan said.

“I feel like Christopher’s most talked about moment from last season was him loving grass, which right now looks pretty good.

He’s been texting our neighbors the past couple days that, ‘All of our grass looks real green, guys!’ “

Christopher smiles when reminded that Full Speed documented his fascination with an immaculate lawn on the corner of their street.

“He’s the most meticulous guy in the world,” Christopher said of the house’s owner. “He’s the benchmark.

But my grass will never get there until I actually dedicate time to doing it myself, which I’m not going to do in the near future, So I got what I got.”

Also heavily featured in their personal lives is Sadie, the 7-year-old Bichon Frise-Poodle mix that they got as a puppy.

A 7-pound runt of the litter, Sadie became a star after a viral meme of her sitting in Christopher’s lap.

“He’d always sit in that chair pre-race, and Sadie would always hop in his lap,” said Morgan, who originally posted the photo to social media.

“So every time she did it, I took a picture because I thought it was cute.”

Sadie has a new playmate, another Poochon (but twice the size) they got March 31.

Though she was sent to a two-week board and train (to cure some “not good puppy behaviors”), Bailey could become the family’s biggest star yet. (“She’s more outgoing than Sadie,” Christopher said.)

And that would be just fine with the Bells, who ultimately hope that Full Speed presents them (along with other drivers and their families) as “normal people.

Like point blank, the end,” Morgan said. “They’re all normal people. They’re just like everybody who’s watching it.

“Their job might be one of the cooler jobs that a lot of people don’t have. But outside of that, they are just normal people.”

written aboutNate Ryan has  NASCAR since 1996 while working at the San Bernardino Sun, Richmond Times-Dispatch, USA TODAY and for the past 10 years at NBC Sports Digital. He is a contributor to the “Hauler Talk” show on the NASCAR Podcast Network.

He also has covered various other motorsports, including the IndyCar and IMSA series.