Bob Pockrass
FOX NASCAR Insider
As the NASCAR Cup Series heads to Las Vegas Motor Speedway (Sunday at 3:30 p.m. ET on FOX) for its March race, many will point to this event a year ago as to where Chase Elliott suffered his biggest setback in 2023.
Elliott wasn’t even in the race as he broke his leg the day before qualifying while snowboarding in Colorado. He would miss the next six races.
The Hendrick Motorsports driver had an inconsistent return as he managed six top-5s and nine top-10s in the remaining 18 regular-season races (he only ran 17 as he was suspended for one race for his wrecking of Denny Hamlin at Charlotte).
Elliott would finish out the year with five top-10s (but no top-5s) in the first six races of the playoffs (he wasn’t eligible for the championship, but his team was eligible for the owners title) before finishing off the year with four finishes of 15th or worse. For the year, he averaged a finish of 14.5, his worst since 2019.
So going into this year, when talking about who needed a rebound in 2024, Elliott was the driver most talked about.
Elliott, when previewing the season earlier this year, wouldn’t use the word “rebound” to describe what he seeks in 2024.
“It’s not about rebounding or whatever,” Elliott said. “It’s just getting to the level that we feel we’re capable of achieving.
“And that’s really all that matters to me.”
Chase Elliot on dealing with adversity last season and what success looks like in 2024
With the first two races of the year at the unpredictable drafting tracks of Daytona and Atlanta, Elliott sits sixth in the standings. It’s starting this week at Las Vegas, a more traditional 1.5-mile track, where Elliott will really begin to learn if the team is returning to the level it is capable of achieving.
Elliott and crew chief Alan Gustafson are in their ninth year working together, the longest current driver-crew chief relationship in the garage.
“What’s most exciting to me is the opportunity and the blank canvas we have this year to continue to build something that’s good,” Gustafson said.
Elliott views it as a team effort, and it is relatively apparent that his ability to adapt to the evolution and gains teams and drivers are making in the Next Gen car has taken longer than it has for other drivers. As with any change in a race car, the changes will fall into the skill set of some drivers and require others to adjust much more.
He did win five races in the first season of the Next Gen car in 2022 but his average finish and laps led were still lower than the previous two years.
Elliott won 18 races from 2018-2022 and made three consecutive Championship 4 appearances from 2020-2022, including capturing the 2020 Cup title. He has gone winless in his last 48 races and says there is truth to saying it is taking him a little longer to find what he wants in this car.
“It’s always been a fine line of hitting it right, and I think that as you transition to new cars — which mind you this is the first time I’ve gone through a transition like that — so breaking habits and kind of reteaching yourself in some areas to ultimately extract performance is a hard thing to do when you’ve grown to do things a certain way,” Elliott said.
So what changes?
“We’ve identified some areas that need to be improved upon,” Elliott said. “Step one is identifying it. And then after that, it’s going to work and trying to find solutions.”
Looking back on his winless 2023, Elliott can look at missing the playoffs as a frustrating season. But he also looks at the why. He doesn’t feel if he didn’t get hurt that he would have magically won four or five races. Overall, he felt he just was not fast enough to win races.
“It wasn’t all doom and gloom,” Elliott said. “There were some high spots, and we had a few opportunities to win that we didn’t capitalize on.
“But I think more than anything, we just have not been performing and I have not been performing as I expect of myself, and like we expect of our team.”
In other words, he’s trying to keep his outlook for this year simple.
“We just want to do the job that we feel like we’re capable of doing and try to get to that point and do it consistently,” Elliott said. “That’s all we’re looking for.”
Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including over 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass.
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