One bad finish in playoffs could spoil Chase Elliott’s NASCAR dream season

NASCAR Cup star Chase Elliott is living every playoff driver’s worst nightmare. One disastrous finish can spoil an entire season.

Elliott, the 2020 Cup champion, won a series-most four races during a year in which no one else won more than two. He led the points standings for 22 straight weeks; won the regular-season title; and was the top seed and presumptive favorite to win his second championship.

And then Darlington happened.

Elliott lost control of his No. 9 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet on lap 113 of the opening playoffs race last Sunday night, was struck by the oncoming car of Chase Briscoe, and Elliott’s car suffered enough suspension damage that he could not return to the track.

He finished a dead-last 36th and plunged from atop the standings to ninth going into the Hollywood Casino 400 on Sunday at Kansas Speedway, the second race of the Round of 16. Elliott trails leader Joey Logano by 24 points and is just 14 points ahead of the cutline to advance to the Round of 12.

Of course, all he has to do to ensure advancement to the Round of 12 is win either at Kansas or Bristol on Sept. 17 or hope to collect enough points to remain in the top 12.

“This is a sport that will humble you really fast, so when you come off of a good week, that doesn’t guarantee the next one is going to go that good again,” Elliott said. “It’s inevitable that it’s going to go the other direction at some point … “

That point is now, where Elliott is in danger of failing to advance to the Round of 12, or digging himself too deep of a hole, that he could fall short of the last two rounds, unless he pulls out a victory.

It’s happened to regular-season champions before. In 2018, Kyle Busch won the regular-season and made it to the Championship Four race, only to finish fourth. In 2020, regular-season champion Kevin Harvick was eliminated in the Round of 8.

In the five years since the current playoff system was implemented, three regular-season champions — Martin Truex Jr., (2017), Kyle Busch (2019) and Kyle Larson (2021) — won the championship.

Elliott wasn’t alone in a disappointing opening result at Darlington. Harvick and Busch saw their engines blow up, leading to a 30th place finish for Busch and 33rd for Harvick. Busch enters Sunday’s race 11th in the standings and Harvick last at 16th. Kyle Larson, a teammate of Elliott’s and defending Cup champion was 12th at Darlington and is seventh in the standings.

“Honestly, I really don’t care about other guys, and I’m certainly not going to get excited about other peoples’ misfortune,” Elliott said. “That’s not how I operate and not how our team operates. I’m disappointed, and our team is frustrated that I had a bad day. We didn’t do a good job controlling the things we can control, and that, to me, is where our focus is and where it should be.”

Elliott, 26, took full responsibility for his mishap at Darlington where he said he “was cruising to the (end of) the first stage” before his car spun from his control and was damaged by the oncoming Chase Briscoe.

“He got swept up in our mess,” Elliott said of Briscoe, who was able to return to the track and finish 27th in his playoff debut. “You never want to have that happen to someone like that who was an innocent bystander. I made a really bad mistake that cost us a solid day, but when you have something like that happen, there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. You can’t go back and change things. Your only choice in those situations is get prepared for the next week. You wait seven days and try again.

“This is part of racing, and I hold myself to a standard to where I don’t want those mistakes to transpire, but unfortunately, that’s not life. Reality is mistakes are going to be made, and you’re going to have tough days at the office. I’m just glad my office is driving race cars and turning left most of the time for a living.

“When you have a bad day, you can’t do anything about it after the fact. You focus on Kansas and try again.”

Elliott, voted NASCAR’s Most Popular Driver for the past four years, has enjoyed success at Kansas, including a victory in the 2018 fall race that propelled him to the Round of 8 in the playoffs. And he’s posted five top fives in his last seven starts at Kansas, including second last fall. But in this spring’s race, after he led 10 laps, a flat tire consigned him to 29th place.

“I love coming to Kansas; it’s a fun race track,” he said. “It’s a place that is challenging for the drivers, it’s a place where you can move around and have different lane options, which is fun. A place where we’ve had some good cars and cashed in once. We’d like to cash in again, and we’re very capable of doing that.

“We didn’t have a stellar start to the weekend in the spring race, I felt like we had things much better in the race until we had a tire problem. We hope we can build off that and execute a good race weekend.”

Before the last two weeks, Elliott was a model of consistency, In addition to his four wins, he is tied for the series lead with 10 Top 5 finishes and leads with 17 Top 10s in 27 starts. And his average finish of 11.5 is by far and away the best — more than two spots better than Logano’s 13.6.

Though he’s finished uncharacteristic 29th at Daytona and 36th at Darlington in the last two weeks, Elliott doesn’t plan to change a thing in the way he races.

“I’m going to stick with my gut, regardless what happened last week, two weeks ago or a month ago,” he said “I’m going to go with my gut, feeling what I feel is right in the car. That is the best way for me to perform at my best is to go with what I think is right at that particular time.

“You can certainly create a lot of your own luck depending upon how well you prepare at the shop; the decisions you make in what setup you want to put underneath the car; how you execute when you get to the racetrack; the decisions I make on track throughout a race; how (crew chief) Alan Gustafson calls a race.

“All of those factors can go into you creating whether or not you’re going to or not going to have a good day. If you make all of those right choices and you have some good fortune on track and things go your way, likely you’re going to be in for a good afternoon.”