Chase Elliott thought his crash on Saturday was going to eliminate him from the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs, but more brutally and honestly, he felt his Hendrick Motorsports No. 9 team really deserved to be out due to recent performance struggles. This was the candid analysis of the 2020 Cup Series champion during a Wednesday appearance on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.
Elliott crashed out of the Bristol Night Race after attempting a move down the track in front of John Hunter Nemechek. The contact sent the No. 9 car hard into the wall, ending his race prematurely.
“I just felt the urgency to get to the bottom and try to do what I could to save some tire,” Elliott explained on Sirius. “It was a high risk, but I felt like it was a risk that I needed to try to take at that point in time in my head. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out.”
This incident marked his sixth finish outside the top-10 over the past eight races. Despite the setback, Elliott started the playoffs as the seventh seed with a seven-point buffer above the cutline. While his 17th-place finish at Bristol didn’t help matters, a strong third-place result at Gateway gave him just enough margin to survive a worst-case scenario.
At the time he climbed out of the car and spoke to the media, Elliott wasn’t aware he had avoided elimination.
“At that time, I thought our night—I thought our season—was over, to be honest,” he told host Dave Moody. “I didn’t have a good grasp on where some of the other competitors below the cutline were running. I had a brief conversation with [crew chief] Alan [Gustafson] right when I got out of the car. I was like, ‘Man, is that going to knock us out?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I think so.’ At that point, obviously, we were just bummed.”
Elliott added that it took some time for him to realize the true situation and what it would take to eliminate them.
“I got to watch it on TV with everybody else. It wasn’t the most pleasant hour and a half or so of my life watching, but it worked out, fortunately. Got really lucky with that, no question.”
Currently, Elliott remains the seventh seed but now holds just a five-point advantage over the new cutline after the elimination of four drivers at Bristol.
Looking ahead, New Hampshire Motor Speedway has some similarities to Gateway — a track where Hendrick Motorsports performed well earlier in the month. However, Elliott acknowledges that he and his team need to step up their game or risk seeing his worst fears for the season come true in this round.
“New Hampshire, Kansas, Roval… I just feel like, yeah, you’re kind of in a spot where, ‘Man, we really didn’t deserve to be here based on the week before, let’s go and make the very most of it,’” Elliott told Moody.
“I just feel like there’s nothing to lose for us at this point. We’ve got to make something happen, get some life, and get our heads down and just grind it out these next three weeks.”
He reflected on his season so far, saying, “It’s kind of been one of those years in general, just trying — some of those days taking what was there. I was really encouraged by our Gateway performance, to be frank, and I thought there was a lot of really good stuff that went on there throughout the course of the event.”
Looking forward to New Hampshire, Elliott concluded, “I think New Hampshire has some similarities to Gateway, so I’m looking forward to seeing how we stack up in that regard.”
https://ca.sports.yahoo.com/news/elliott-says-really-deserved-eliminated-025253057.html