Did You Notice? … Chase Elliott is suddenly the hottest NASCAR Cup Series driver at Hendrick Motorsports?
Elliott was fifth at Pocono Raceway Sunday (June 22), his best performance at the track since winning there in 2022. He’s now posted back-to-back top-five finishes for the first time all season.
Elliott remains winless, failing to earn a single playoff point. But he’s risen to fifth in points based on consistency. In the last 11 races, he has 10 top-15 finishes, the only outlier a 16th-place effort at Texas Motor Speedway in May.
Since Memorial Day weekend, Elliott’s been even better: 21 laps led in a five-race stretch to go with 36 positions gained from where he started. He’s thriving during a time when everyone else at Hendrick is a little topsy-turvy heading into the summer.
Hendrick Motorsports – Last 5 Races
| Driver | Wins | Top 5s | Top 10s | Laps Led | Avg. Finish | Position Differential |
| Chase Elliott | 0 | 2 | 3 | 21 | 8.4 | +36 |
| William Byron | 0 | 2 | 3 | 383 | 14.2 | -3 |
| Kyle Larson | 0 | 1 | 3 | 34 | 18.6 | -28 |
| Alex Bowman | 0 | 1 | 1 | 15 | 23.2 | -16 |
Now, most organizations would kill to be on just a five-race winless streak (the last time an HMS car reached victory lane was with Larson at Kansas Speedway). It’s a small stretch over a long season; this organization remains a title favorite.
It’s just which way the winds are currently blowing.
For Byron, he just can’t find a way to finish. A dominant run in the Coca-Cola 600 was snuffed out by Ross Chastain with only a handful of laps remaining. He led a race-high 98 laps at Michigan International Speedway just two weeks later, only to run out of gas. And at Pocono, Byron could never fully recover from track position lost during a qualifying crash.
In Larson’s camp, something just seems off ever since the Indianapolis 500-Coca-Cola 600 double ended in disaster. Larson looked burnt out then, and there’s been no breather for him to slow down or change the narrative. Instead, NASCAR’s traveled nearly 5,000 miles in just the last two weeks alone, from Michigan down to Mexico City and back up to the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. That doesn’t quite feel like the vacation he might need to reset, in the midst of a busy racing schedule which doesn’t allow him to reset.
Then there’s Bowman, who’s falling under increasing pressure to win as he’s squarely on the playoff bubble. Despite a contract that runs through 2026, it’s hard for him to feel self-assured the way Silly Season talk flared up around him last summer.
That leaves Elliott on a high heading to his hometown racetrack, EchoPark Speedway. It’s high time for him to do something, in the midst of a career crossroads at age 29. Once the future of this HMS organization, earning five wins and a championship from 2018-’22, Elliott has just one victory and some cameo appearances out front ever since.
Larson and Byron have gone on to lap Elliott time and again, as the No. 9 struggles to regain its former magic. He’s led a total of 721 laps the past two-and-a-half years; in 2022 alone, Elliott led 857. The sport’s Most Popular Driver, under constant scrutiny, has been eerily reminiscent of Dale Earnhardt Jr. at HMS, where the blockbuster pairing never quite lived up to expectations. Like the Earnhardt scenario, the Hendrick brain trust has been hesitant to throw a new crew chief Elliott’s way right now, insisting vet Alan Gustafson isn’t the problem.
Midway through the year, Elliott felt like a forever third on the HMS ladder, resigned to watching Byron and Larson eat up most of the win total within the four-car organization.
And then ever so slowly, Elliott has begun reemerging.
He’s doing so at a good time, during a season where it appears the championship remains a wide-open race. A year that began with a handful of drivers out front has now featured four first-time season winners in the last five events. No one has more than 23 playoff points; two wins from Elliott between now and the end of the season would all but halve that deficit.
That bodes well for a driver who once found a way to always get hot in the summer. Once upon a time, the upcoming schedule would have left Elliott licking his chops: hometown Atlanta, then the road/street course track type he used to dominated with races on the Chicago street course and Sonoma Raceway. It’s hard to believe it’s been almost four years since Elliott was victorious on a road course, the July 4 weekend at Road America in 2021. He remains 0-for-Next Gen, seemingly handicapped by a car that’s taken some superstars longer to figure out (Kyle Busch, anyone?).
But longer isn’t a synonym for “never.” And just like when Earnhardt was out front, the sport could use a boost in the summer months if one of its favorites finds a way back in front of the camera. You see flashes of what could be, like this weekend when the normally soft-spoken Elliott spoke out on the difficulty of dirty air at Pocono.
“There’s been a lot of complaints about the dirty air today and how clean air was king,” Elliott said Sunday. “It seems we’re hearing that a lot more often.”
In Elliott land? That’s the equivalent of dropping the gloves and throwing down. It’s also a glimmer of confidence that he took a car that was junky at the start of the weekend, turned it around and brought it home inside the top five. The type of thing he and Gustafson used to do on a weekly basis.
HMS maintains the pairing is just as powerful. Can it finally break out in these next couple of weeks and show it?
Did You Notice? … Quick hits before taking off …
- It feels … icky for Bubba Wallace right now. 23XI Racing just doesn’t have winning speed at the moment, and the environment is ripe for the same type of 2024 circumstances that saw Wallace slipping out of the playoffs once again.
- For all the talk about Carson Hocevar, he’s now got an average finish of just 27th in the last three races and looks ready to flame out in round one of the NASCAR In-Season Tournament. Hard to maintain the momentum of recent weeks if you don’t find a way to get over the hump and win.
Follow Tom Bowles on X at @NASCARBowles
The author of Did You Notice? (Wednesdays) Tom spends his time overseeing Frontstretch’s 40+ staff members as its majority owner and Editor-in-Chief. Based outside Philadelphia, Bowles is a two-time Emmy winner in NASCAR television and has worked in racing production with FOX, TNT, and ESPN while appearing on-air for SIRIUS XM Radio and FOX Sports 1's former show, the Crowd Goes Wild. He most recently consulted with SRX Racing, helping manage cutting-edge technology and graphics that appeared on their CBS broadcasts during 2021 and 2022.
You can find Tom’s writing here, at CBSSports.com and Athlonsports.com, where he’s been an editorial consultant for the annual racing magazine for 15 years.