CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Chase Elliott is making his return.
NASCAR’s most popular driver announced on Wednesday afternoon that he will be back in the No. 9 Cup Series car for Hendrick Motorsports this weekend at Martinsville Speedway.
This will be the first time Elliott has run a Cup race in five races. The 27-year-old sustained a fractured tibia in his left leg (braking leg) as a result of a snowboarding accident a few days before the race at Las Vegas the first weekend in March.
Elliott announced his return in an understated tweet: “See y’all at Martinsville.”
“We’re looking forward to having Chase back in his race car to pick up where he left off,” Hendrick Motorsports owner Rick Hendrick said in a statement. “Since the injury, he’s worked extremely hard and focused all his time and energy on returning to the No. 9 team.
“Throughout the last six weeks, he’s stayed fully engaged with everything we’re doing, and we know he’s chomping at the bit to get on the racetrack and compete for wins.”
The 2020 Cup Series champion tested Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning in the simulator before deciding on making his return. And despite missing races, the driver will not only be eligible to make the 2023 playoffs — thanks to a medical waiver granted from NASCAR — he will be expected to.
Elliott is currently 134 points behind the playoff cutline — the driver who sits 16th in the standings is Chris Buescher with 183 points — so the No. 9 car will likely have to make it into Victory Lane to earn a playoff spot.
Not that that should be a problem: Elliott won a series-high five races and made the Championship 4 in 2022.
Elliott hasn’t been completely away from the spotlight since his injury. The driver made an appearance as an analyst on Fox for the Cup race at COTA last month. He has also made jokes at his own expense, attempting to gracefully make light out of a frustrating situation. In March, he tweeted: “It has come to my attention that the formal request I submitted for a slight edit to the March section of my script was indeed... declined.”
Elliott’s injury prompted a lot of talk across the garage area and among fans about what drivers should be permitted to do on-and-off the track. The industry has largely come out with a singular voice: You need to live your life outside of a stock car, too.
“These guys have to go out and live a life outside of the racetrack,” Jeff Andrews, HMS’s president and general manager, said in a press conference following Elliott’s successful surgery in early March. “Certainly, what Chase was doing wasn’t anything abnormal for him. He’s an experienced snowboarder and he’s been doing it most of his life. It was an accident. A similar injury could happen falling off a mountain bike, or stepping off a curb while you’re jogging. It was an accident and Chase feels awful about it but our stance on it is just that. It was an accident and our guys have to go out and live their lives.”
