(Photo: Nigel Kinrade Photography)
By Aaron Bearden
PHOENIX — You don’t have to tell Chase Elliott that he made a mistake last week at Texas Motor Speedway.
He knew far before the end of the race.
“I had 475 miles to think about it last week,” Elliott said in a Friday media availability at ISM Raceway. “I deserve that, really, to ride around for 475 miles and think about it.”
While Kevin Harvick was driving off to a Championship 4-clinching win at Texas Motor Speedway, Elliott was left riding around multiple laps down – a miserable slog caused by an early crash.
Trapped with little to race for, Elliott began to look to the week ahead. His playoff hopes look bleak, but there’s one way he and Hendrick Motorsports can overcome them.
Win in Phoenix.
“During the race last week I was thinking about Phoenix,” Elliott said. “Just thinking about what we struggled with here in the spring. I’m cruising around, just thinking about what we could do to be better.”
Elliott has had a tumultuous playoff run in his fourth Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series season. The Georgian rolled into the postseason with two wins and scored a top-five in the opening race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. But a 13th-place effort at Richmond Raceway and mid-race crash from the lead at the Charlotte Motor Speedway ROVAL left Elliott at risk of an early elimination.
In the face of adversity, Elliott and the No. 9 team battled back. They rallied to retake the lead and win in Charlotte, clinching a spot in the Round of 12.
The Round of 8 opened with another setback at Dover International Speedway in the form of an engine failure just eight laps into the race, but Elliott overcame the odds once again to advance with finishes of eighth and second at Talladega Superspeedway and Kansas Speedway.
That placed the 23-year-old in the Round of 8, but the first two races of the penultimate round didn’t go to plan. Elliott opened the round with back-to-back finishes outside of the top 30 for the first time in a single season, facing mechanical issues at Martinsville Speedway and crashing in Texas.
That left him in a sizable playoff hole entering this weekend’s cutoff race at Phoenix. He sits 78 points behind fourth-place Joey Logano, in need of a victory to have any chance at competing for a championship at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
“Takes some talent to get 80 points back in two weeks, but we’ve achieved it,” Elliott quipped sarcastically. “Certainly self-inflicted. I hate that I messed up last week as bad as I did. You know, really no excuse for that.
“But we’re in the position we’re in. We’re there, it’s reality. We certainly are going to have to win here to have a shot next week.”
Logano is one of four drivers currently poised to earn the right to compete for a title next weekend, joining winners Harvick and Martin Truex Jr., as well a 2015 champion Kyle Busch. The quartet have each made the Championship 4 more than they’ve missed it over the five years of the elimination playoff era.
Elliott wants to find himself in the same situation, and he isn’t far off. He’s managed to crack the Round of 8 in three consecutive seasons, and nearly won his way to Homestead in 2017.
But after the past two weeks, Elliott knows that this might not be the year – and at this point, he’s come to terms with that.
“We’ll either run good this weekend or we don’t,” he said. “If we do, we have a chance next week. If we don’t, we’ll go to Homestead and try to build a notebook for hopefully an opportunity down the road.”
