ATLANTA — Chase Elliott could use a hug. The kind of warm, understanding embrace you can get only at home. The kind that makes everything OK again. That and some unimpeded horsepower would be nice for Georgia’s own Elliott during Sunday night’s Quaker State 400 at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
A season unlike any other for Elliott — one of nearly as many stops as starts, one T-boned more than once by questionable decision making — comes home trying to find its happy place again.
His last race was a parable for Elliott’s entire 2023. At Chicago a week ago, Elliott crashed during qualifying, forcing him to start at the rear in a backup car. He spent race day overcoming the self-inflicted deficit, grinding and grinding his way through traffic on the way to a highly respectable third-place finish.
Just as in that race, he has spent the meat of this season trying to clamber out of a deep hole. Granted, his were the hands that did the digging. Deciding that driving at 180 mph for a living wasn’t excitement enough, Elliott did a little additional in-season thrill-seeking on a snowboarding trip to Colorado in March. He finished second to gravity, costing him a broken leg and six races on the 36-race schedule. Then ill-temper got the best of him in May in Charlotte when he sent Denny Hamlin into a wall, a move NASCAR deemed intentional and worthy of a one-race suspension.
Rather than enjoying his return to Atlanta for this spring’s race, reveling in his victory there in the summer of ‘22, one he classified as, “a very special race for me,” Elliott had a sadly quiet March 19.
“I was getting from the couch to the kitchen to the bathroom back to the couch,” recalled Elliott, at the time recovering from the break and the resulting surgery. “It was a bit of a challenge at that point in time.”
That particular absence stung because Atlanta is the place where the son of the storied Bill Elliott forged his lead foot on the quarter-mile layout carved into the AMS infield.
When waxing nostalgic, Chase will say: “I remember (as a kid) racing on that quarter mile, hoping and dreaming that I could race one day on the big track. We are just over there on the front straightaway, and you have this massive mile-and-a-half speedway that you are inside of. You want to make it there one day and have a shot on the big track.”
All of the absences combined played havoc with young Elliott’s standing in the sport. The 2020 series champion and the sport’s perennial most popular driver has been a non-factor in the points table, currently standing 24th. Eight races remain before the playoffs, for which the top 16 qualify. Eleven drivers already are in through race wins. Those handy with numbers can come up with some formula where a winless Elliott could make it on points. Elliott wants no part of math.
“I think for us, we really need to win,” he said, laying out his straight, two-lane road to the playoffs.
All experience is a lesson. In Elliott’s case, he has dived into some funky alternative studies this year. Here was a fellow you couldn’t dynamite out of the car, never having missed a race the past nine years between NASCAR’s major league and junior circuits. He somehow had managed to avoid calamitous injury even while spending the better part of a decade buckled into a rocket ship. Yet here he is now halfway into the 2023 schedule having missed nearly 40% of the races and having led only a puny 38 laps.
The debate over whether snowboarding was an appropriate in-season diversion for him has subsided — and in Elliott’s case, he has declared he alone will be the one deciding his free-time risk tolerance. He dutifully served his time for the dust-up with Hamlin. All that’s left is to file away the hiccups and make up for lost time.
Taking the pragmatic groove, Elliott said, “I’ve never had an injury of any sort; that has been eye-opening on a lot of levels. Any time you view a similar operation from a different vantage point there are things to be learned from that. I think I’ve learned some lessons throughout the season — good and bad. As a team and a driver and a person outside the car, I think I’ll be better for it, we’ll be better for it. I hate that it happened, but you can’t go back and change those things.”
A win would cure many ills. It would do much to make those missed races moot, greasing his way into the playoffs. For a NASCAR playoffs without Chase Elliott would be like southern potato salad without the mustard.
That’s where Atlanta comes in handy. More than just a sentimental stop, AMS can be a most useful one for Elliott. His first victory in nine starts at Atlanta last year was the centerpiece to a summer splurge in which he had finishes of 1-2-1-2-1 over a five-race span. Might his home track lead to another outbreak of checkered flags?
The human disclaimer that Elliott often repeats is that past performance does not predict future returns. “It’s hard to look back to last year and say, oh, yeah, we were super good at those tracks, we’re going to be just as good going back. I don’t look at it like that. So much has changed.”
Yet, there’s no denying there is proof of life in the No. 9 car, seeing how he’s the only driver out there who can claim top-5 finishes in each of the past three races.
“When you’re putting yourself in the top five and finishing up front and being in the mix during those last couple restarts at the end of the race, you’re going to have your opportunity,” he said.
Poor Hamlin (that other party in the Elliott suspension). He’s not likely to get much of a warm reception this weekend from the heavily pro-Chase public. Race fans do so love a grievance.
“(The reception) is about the same every week, I’m not a fan favorite for sure,” Hamlin said last week. “I think me and Chase have a lot of mutual respect for each other. Sometimes when you race close with someone often enough, you’re going to have contact, and that stuff (like Charlotte) is going to happen. I got the worse end of it, as bad a crash as I had. I know how I felt that week.”
But there’ll be nothing but warmth for Elliott back home Sunday. These folks missed him in the spring. For whatever it’s worth, he’ll have the tailwind of the home crowd. At this stage, Elliott can use all the good feelings he can get.
