At the time, Chase Elliott’s dominant win in February’s Cook Out Clash at Bowman Gray Stadium felt as if the universe was righting itself.
The 2020 NASCAR Cup Series champion and the reigning seven-time most popular driver had been in the midst of a two-year slump. But after closing out the 2024 NASCAR season with race-winning speed at Homestead-Miami Speedway and Martinsville Speedway (with a near-Championship 4 berth in the latter), the Clash win looked to be all the evidence needed to anoint Elliott as a bona-fide title contender for 2025.
That race was three months ago. And yet, it feels like an eternity has passed since.
We’re now 11 races into the 2025 season, and Elliott’s Clash performance has become the exception, not the rule. He’s only led 45 laps this season (with 42 of them coming at Martinsville) and he’s lagging well behind Hendrick Motorsports teammates William Byron and Kyle Larson in race-winning speed.
Elliott’s average start of 15.9 through 11 races is on pace to be the second worst of his career, only ahead of his injury-riddled 2023. Add in the fact that he’s only won one race in his last 86 starts and some Elliott fans have begun pressing the panic button.
But is all the panic necessary?
He hasn’t been awful in 2025 by any means — he’s fourth in points and his average finish of 11.4 only trails Byron (8.9) and Larson (10.6). But being fourth in points doesn’t tell the whole story. Instead, it’s masking several issues within the No. 9 team that would otherwise be at the forefront.
If there’s one thing that Elliott excels at more than any other driver in the field, it’s taking care of his equipment. He maximizes what his car is capable of and he seldom makes low-probability moves or puts himself in a position to get wrecked.
Elliott only has four DNFs in the 74 starts since returning from his snowboarding injury — for an exceptional DNF rate of just 5.4% — far better than anyone else in the same time span.
His propensity to avoid trouble is shown in the box score — he has a career average finish of 12.8 in 333 Cup starts, which is the best average among all active full-time Cup drivers. Elliott started 2024 with 19 consecutive top-20 finishes. He also led the series in average finish last season (11.7). It’s more of the same in 2025, as he’s riding a streak of 11 consecutive top 20s to start the year.
But here’s the thing: stringing together top 15s and top 20s in the current playoff format means nothing. It’s not 2003 anymore. That may fly in the regular season and allow Elliott to remain in the mix for regular season bonus points, but it’s a recipe for elimination in the fall. Stage wins and race wins are what pay the big bucks and propel a driver and team toward a championship.
And that’s where the concern lies with Elliott’s current season: he’s not fourth in points because of winning or running up front, he’s fourth in points because he’s grinding out top-15 finishes after running outside the top 10 most of the day.
That’s reflected in his average running position (ARP) this season. Notice how Byron, Larson, Denny Hamlin and Christopher Bell have the brightest shades of red in the top five, as they’ve spent the balance of the season at the front of the field. Meanwhile, Elliott’s brightest shades of red hover between 11th-20th; he’s running mid-pick more often than he’s running top 10.
In fact, Elliott only has one race this season where he’s recorded an average running position better than 10th: Martinsville, where he had an ARP of fourth.
When looking at ARP comparisons between Elliott, Larson and Byron, it’s clear that the No. 9 team is lagging behind. Larson has had seven races with an ARP better than 10th, while Byron has had six.
Byron has — on average — run five spots better than Elliott this season. And if you remove Larson’s outlier at Darlington Raceway, where he spent the majority of the afternoon in dead last after a lap 4 crash, he’s had a season-long ARP of 9.9, right there with Byron.
(Side note: the gold, silver and bronze fillings indicate that a driver recorded a win, top five or top 10 in that respective race).
Martinsville is the lone race where Elliott has had true winning speed this season.
But that’s become the expectation for him, as Martinsville is easily his best track performance-wise in the Next Gen car. He’s led 40-plus laps in six of his seven starts at Martinsville since 2022, with the one outlier being his first race back from injury in 2023.
In fact, Elliott’s 318 laps led at Martinsville since 2023 account for nearly half of the paltry 671 laps he’s led since 2023.
Just 671 laps led and one points-paying win in the last two-and-a-half seasons, versus five wins and 857 laps led in 2022 alone. He can be fourth in points, he can lead the series in average finish and so on, but none of that changes the fact that the No. 9 team has a long way to go to return to the heights it previously achieved.
And you can guarantee that one in the Hendrick camp — not Elliott, not Alan Gustafson, not Rick Hendrick — is truly satisfied with the No. 9 team’s recent performance. Being fourth in points is a nice consolation, but the ultimate prize is winning races and racking up trophies.
That’s something Elliott and co. have struggled with and continue to struggle with, with no end in sight.
Stephen Stumpf is the NASCAR Content Director for Frontstretch and is a three-year veteran of the site. His weekly column is “Stat Sheet,” and he formerly wrote "4 Burning Questions" for three years. He also writes commentaries, contributes to podcasts, edits articles and is frequently at the track for on-site coverage.
Find Stephen on Twitter @stephen_stumpf