Why Chase Elliott can rebound from his worst NASCAR season

DAYTONA BEACH — NASCAR star Chase Elliott is blunt about the reasons that didn’t factor into the worst season of his Cup Series career.

It wasn’t the broken leg that sidelined him for six races. Or the nagging shoulder injury that he addressed with offseason surgery. It definitely wasn’t a lack of comfort with the team around him at Hendrick Motorsports.

But ask him about the reasons that did cause the 2020 champion to go winless and miss the playoffs for the first time ever, and NASCAR’s most popular driver clams up.

“Things we talk about behind closed doors,” Elliott said.

The closed-door conversations could not have been pleasant last year around the No. 9 Chevrolet. It wasn’t just the leg injury he sustained off the track in a snowboarding accident. He missed another race due to suspension.

When he was on the track, he set career lows with seven top 5s, 195 laps led and a 17th-place finish in points.

As bad as it was, Elliott figures it could have been worse.

“When you have a year like last year, it is really easy for a team to blow up from the inside,” Elliott said. “Like, really easy. You don’t know how easy.”

But, Elliott said, that didn’t happen for reasons that bode well for a rebound this season, starting with Sunday’s Daytona 500.

Elliott never saw signs that his crew wanted to quit. There was frustration, but the competitive fire never waned. After a fourth-place finish in the regular-season finale at Daytona International Speedway wasn’t enough to make the playoffs, Elliott and his team responded with six consecutive finishes inside the top 11. One relative highlight: leading 47 laps at Kansas in a sixth-place finish.

Elliott said the intensity continued all offseason and that his relationship with crew chief Alan Gustafson has never been stronger.

“When I look at where our team is at mentally, our drive and our will and our willingness to fight and not quit, I think it’s at an all-time high to be honest with you…” Elliott said during Wednesday’s Daytona 500 media day. “I’m just super proud of those things regardless of how the season goes, because I work with a group of guys who don’t want to give up on me. I don’t want to give up on them.

“That, to me, means a lot when you go to war every week, that (we) have no desire to quit. It speaks volumes. That, in my opinion, is a huge hurdle in trying to get back to where we think we can be and where I feel where we belong.”

Speedweeks showed at least a small step in that direction; Elliott had one of the five quickest cars during Wednesday’s qualifying session and finished second in Thursday night’s first Duel.

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You don’t have to search too hard to find other reasons to think Elliott can bounce back into championship contention. Though Elliott said he has some bad habits that don’t mesh with the Next Gen car, he presumably has had enough time to fix them. Because Chevrolet didn’t change its designs the way Ford and Toyota did this offseason, Elliott could benefit from a little more continuity and certainty.

If nothing else, Elliott arrived for NASCAR’s biggest race ready for a reset.

“There is a sense of a new opportunity, and I’m appreciative of that,” Elliott said. “There’s also realistic understanding that your problems don’t disappear because of the calendar change from ’23 to ’24. We know that we need to be better, and I need to be better and intend on continuing to build on what we were working on at the end of last year and just keep our heads down and keep pushing.”