NASCAR: With Chase Elliott, is the sport in good hands?

NASCAR will go where Chase Elliott, the sport’s new most popular driver, takes it. With this in mind, is the sport in good hands?

In our recent article about why there is no way around the fact that NASCAR will go where Chase Elliott takes it, there is one major question that was left unanswered.

With Elliott, is NASCAR truly in good hands?

Stewart-Haas Racing’s Kevin Harvick was critical of Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s NASCAR Cup Series career in that he competed in the sport on a full-time basis for 18 seasons, he won the Most Popular Driver Award a total of 15 years, and he yet he never won a championship and ended up only winning nine races in 10 seasons driving for Hendrick Motorsports, arguably the top team in the Cup Series over the course of the last two-plus decades.

Here is what Harvick had to say about this matter back in August of 2017, which was just a few months after Earnhardt Jr. announced that the 2017 season would be his final season of Cup Series competition.

"“(Earnhardt) hasn’t been anywhere close to being our most successful driver. When you look at other sports – you look at basketball and you look at football and you look at their most popular (athletes), they’re also right on the top of the list as their most successful (athletes).“So for me I believe that Dale Jr. has had a big part in stunting the growth of NASCAR because he’s got these legions of fans and this huge outreach of being able to reach these places that none of us have the possibility to reach. But he’s won nine races in 10 years at Hendrick Motorsports and hasn’t been able to reach outside of that. So I know that those aren’t the most popular comments, but those are real life facts that you look up and see on the stat sheet.”"

Based on this logic, Elliott may have the biggest fanbase among the fanbases of active drivers, but as far as the NASCAR fanbase in general is concerned, he will need to have lot of success over the course of his career, at least a lot more success than Earnhardt Jr. had, to keep the sport from continuing down the path of decline that it is clearly on and has clearly been on for several years.

At the end of the day, NASCAR will go where Elliott takes it; there is no way around it.

Fortunately, Harvick believes that Elliott will have a lot of success throughout the course of his career, and many people agree with him. Here is what he had to say about this matter back in May of 2018, at which point Elliott had still not yet won a Cup Series race.

"“The bottom line is, when you look at our sport, there’s only a few guys that come through this sport that have the name, the history, the heritage of that NASCAR family and carry that through their career, and Chase is one of those guys, and he’s done a great job of carrying himself and being competitive and doing all the things that he does, but he is the NASCAR tie to the beginning of the sport, or however far back you want to look at it.“But he has that family name and that history and the heritage of the hard core NASCAR fan, who are going to be the people who vote that and his dad won a few times in the Most Popular Driver, and he’s the next Dale Jr. He’s the next guy that, is he going to win enough to be the ‘megastar’? At some point.“He’s a star right now, but winning takes you to that next level of being a bigger star, and Chase Elliott winning is better for our sport, and he’s going to be the guy that wins the Most Popular Driver, in my opinion, for the next several years. There is nobody else that has that tie to our sport like Chase does. I can win 20 races a year and I’m never going to have that tie to the sport like Chase does.”"

While Harvick did refer to Elliott as the “next Dale Jr.” and his past comments about Earnhardt Jr.’s popularity and its relation to NASCAR’s success suggest that this in itself may not be a good thing coming from the 43-year-old Bakersfield, California native, he did go on to say that he believes that Elliott can be the sport’s next “megastar”, which is something that Earnhardt Jr. was not.

That has the potential to be the difference between these two drivers, and if it ends up being the difference, it could drastically help the sport.

Will it be the difference?

While it took the 23-year-old Dawsonville, Georgia native until his 99th career Cup Series start to finally earn his first victory, he earned that victory and then reeled off two more victories over the course of the next 10 races. At 22 years old, he had already earned three victories in his Cup Series career, and he earned these victories in an 11-race span.