After a one-year hiatus, Chase Elliott is back in the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs but there isn’t a lot of fanfare around the Hendrick Motorsports No. 9 team this time around.
Elliott finished the regular season third in the standings but is only the seventh seed to start the Round of 16 because he has just one victory earlier in the summer at Texas Motor Speedway. But there are a lot of reasons to anticipate a deep championship run too.
Even though he didn’t make the playoffs as a driver last year, a reflection of the races he missed recovering from a mountain slope incident and one-race suspension, his No. 9 car made the owners championship and advanced all the way into the Round of 8.
Elliott has the second-best average finish of all drivers and has just two finishes outside of the top-20 all season, meaning they just limit the damage in even their worst races. The best example of that was Sunday when Elliott lost a lap early in the Southern 500 but still rallied to finish 11th.
He has the fourth most top-10s and the most top-20s.
The Hendrick Motorsports No. 9, even without the flashiest of stats, are always in or around the top-10 and finish there. That’s how you advance over the next nine weeks with an eye towards the Championship Race at Phoenix.
“I think our odds are good,” Elliott said on Wednesday during Cup Series Playoff Media Day. “I don’t really take a look at a particular round being a problem any more than any other. I think that if we can just get the things that we need to do, going right, I think we can be good all the way through it.
“Obviously, Darlington was bad for sure. We ran way worse than we had hoped to run there. But when I look back at Pocono, Indy, and Michigan, I was really happy where we were headed. Some of those runs and some of the pace that we had, I thought it was some of the best of the year.
“So, I think if we can just get back to that, I think it’s great and I think that is all we have to do. I think it’s just having that type of pace and that type of competitiveness. If we are doing that, we are going to give ourselves opportunities to win and eventually they are going to go your way. So, it’s just about being there on a weekly basis. You do that, and you will get your chances.”
His boss, Hendrick Motorsports vice chairman Jeff Gordon views Elliott and the 9 car in the same light.
“I think right now, if I just look at who’s the most solid championship-caliber team, I think it’s them because, okay, they might not have the laps led and the number of wins but they also don’t have the DNFs,” Gordon said in a Hendrick Motorsports release. “They’re always in this third-to-seventh range almost every weekend and that’s strong.”
That speaks volumes when Gordon also has win leader and top seed Kyle Larson in his stable.
Elliott also has a tremendous track record, literally, at the 10 venues that will decide the championship this autumn. Of his 19 career wins, 10 of them have come at tracks the series will race at over the next 10 weeks.
“Again, I go back to the schedule,” Gordon said. “I think there’s a lot of good race tracks for them and I think a lot of people don’t realize that if you go look at owner and driver over the last few years, those guys have been there. Remember, last year he was out of it on the driver side because of injury but that team was in that top four. I think they’re a real championship-caliber team this year.”
While there is some resentment from drivers towards the current championship format, Elliott says he relishes the intensity and how it drivers him and crew chief Alan Gustafson to execute.
“I have certainly have a lot of fun in the last 10 weeks just because there is something on the line,” Elliott said. “I do enjoy that aspect of being a competitor and showing up each week because it could be a make-or-break weekend for you. I think that is fun, you know?”
Why?
“Well, just because you either do or you don’t,” Elliott said. “That is fun to me. You go to a race and your back is against the wall and you have to perform. You either show up and get it done or if you didn’t, you get your report card that day and you didn’t do a good enough job. And I like that. I like that aspect of that there are intense moments over the course of that stuff. Am I a fan of all the aspects of it, maybe not necessarily, but I do enjoy the fun meter of being a competitor in the last 10 weeks that it brings me.”