NASCAR Cup Series: 5 drivers poised for low-key championship runs
By Asher Fair
Chase Elliott
Ordinarily, you might not consider a driver whose average finish in the last six races is 24.50 and whose top 10 finish total of seven is higher than those of only 14 of the sport’s other 30 drivers a championship contender, but Chase Elliott is another driver in a position to make a low-key title run.
Until teammate Alex Bowman won the race at Chicagoland Speedway to begin Chevrolet’s first three-race winning streak since the 2015 season, Elliott had been the only Chevrolet driver to win a race since Richard Childress Racing’s Austin Dillon opened up the 2018 season by winning the Daytona 500, a race in which he led only the final lap.
Between Dillon’s victory and Bowman’s victory, Elliott earned four victories, which happened to be the first four victories of his Cup Series career. So the man once dubbed “Chokin’ Chase Who Can’t Win A Race” by his critics was responsible for Chevrolet’s only four wins in a 62-race span.
With Chevrolet now performing at their highest level in several years even though they are still a bit behind Toyota and Ford as a whole, now is the time for Elliott to string together another run like he put together earlier this season.
Prior to his recent cold stretch, during which four of his six poor results stemmed from issues completely out of his control, he had been on a five-race streak of top five finishes, which included his victory at Talladega Superspeedway. His average finish during this five-race span was a series-best 3.60.
Elliott has never failed to qualify for the round of 12, and he has advanced to the round of 8 in each of the past two seasons. In both of those seasons, he put himself in a position to advance to the Championship 4 until late in the round of 8 finales, both at ISM Raceway.
Even with his recent cold streak, Elliott sits in eighth place in the championship standings and seventh place in the playoff picture with the fifth highest stage point total. He is more than capable of getting the job done when it counts, something that couldn’t be said about him before he finally got the monkey off his back with his first career win last August at Watkins Glen International.