During a season full of challenges, Chase Elliott remains on the outside looking in for a spot in the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs.
With six races remaining in the regular season, NASCAR’s Most Popular Driver sits 23rd in the standings, 60 points below 16th—the final position to qualify for the postseason. After missing seven of the first 20 races, a 60-point deficit doesn’t sound too bad. Nine drivers behind Elliott have started the entire schedule and still lag behind the Hendrick Motorsports driver.
Still, since his return in April at Martinsville Speedway, after missing six races due to breaking his leg in a snowboarding accident, Elliott has done himself few favors. He hasn’t won. He hasn’t scored any Playoff points.
And when he turned Denny Hamlin into the outside wall in the tri-oval at Charlotte Motor Speedway in May to earn a one-race suspension, not only did Elliott lose the points he would have earned at World Wide Technology Raceway the following week, but he scored just three points in the Coca-Cola 600, finishing 34th.
As the defending winner at Pocono Raceway–albeit after the top two finishers, Hamlin and Kyle Busch were disqualified in last year’s race–now would be as good of a time as ever for Elliott to turn his season around. Where does the 27-year-old racer believe his next win will come?
“I hope here this weekend,” Elliott said. “My thought process really since all this has happened was we were going to have to win. And that’s what everyone was saying until we had a few good weeks of points and then it was, ‘Yeah, he can point his way in.’ The storylines can change pretty fast.”
When Elliott returned from his suspension at Sonoma Raceway, he scored a solid top five. He backed up that result with a fourth-place run at Nashville the following week. Elliott’s pit strategy proved fortunate at the Chicago Street Course where he qualified 26th and finished third after NASCAR shortened the race.
His last two finishes at Atlanta Motor Speedway and New Hampshire Motor Speedway were top 15s.
“We had a couple of good runs that I thought were trending in the right direction,” Elliott said. “Loudon was terrible. We struggled all weekend—which I was disappointed. I think as a team we all were. We had a good test up there a couple of months ago. It hasn’t been a good track, so I was super excited to get some extra laps and go up there and try to get better at a place where we haven’t been super good.
“I thought that we did that. I thought we made a lot of gains. We went back and we were horrendous and didn’t really understand why. We came back in a very similar manner as to how we left and we just missed. That stuff happens, unfortunately.”
After a solid test and finishing second at Loudon in 2022, his 12th-place run was a disappointment.
“We didn’t have the run we wanted to have last weekend, obviously, but I thought the prior three or four weeks, to my recollection, we’re certainly better and in the ball game, so that was good. It’s in there. We just have to extract it.”
Since his full-time Cup Series debut in 2016, Elliott has never missed the Playoffs. He has advanced to the Championship 4 the last three seasons and won the title in 2020.
But Elliott is no longer the top dog at HMS. William Byron has set the bar for the organization—and the sport–0with a series-best four wins and a whopping 22 Playoff points. Elliott’s 25-year-old teammate has also led a career-high 750 laps in for the season—with 16 races remaining. Entering Pocono, Elliott has held the point for 38 circuits.
Certainly, Elliott’s qualifying effort this season hasn’t helped. His average starting position of 18.7 is a career low. Even as a rookie, Elliott’s average was 11.3.
No doubt, the driver is frustrated. Reflecting on how he hopes to be perceived, Elliott just wants to be back in the game—starting this weekend. He’s running the Xfinity Series race on Saturday for extra seat time. On Friday, he qualified 13th.
In 13 Cup starts at Pocono, Elliott has one win, four top fives, and eight top 10s.
“For us, as we look at the tracks coming up, this weekend I think is an opportunity,” Elliott said. “Has it been a phenomenal race track for me? No, it hasn’t, but it is an opportunity to get better. You want to try to improve and that’s where my head is at. I just want to get better. I want to be fighting for wins each week and get in the mix of those guys that when you walk in here after the race, you’re not surprised to see have won an event.
“That’s the group that I’ve always wanted to be in and just let the rest figure itself out. If I’m up here and we’re fighting for top fives and fighting for wins on a weekly basis, I’m good. The rest of it is going to work itself out eventually, and that’s always been my headspace, so it’s no different today. I think we’re very capable of doing that. We just got to put the pieces together at the right time and extract our potential and we’ll be fine.”
Follow Lee Spencer on Twitter @CandiceSpencer or email her at: [email protected].
