NASCAR: Chase Elliott’s championship ends 32-year drought

By Asher Fair | Nov 9, 2020

Chase Elliott, Hendrick Motorsports, NASCAR (Photo by Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images) /

Prior to Chase Elliott’s 2020 NASCAR Cup Series championship, it had been 32 years since the sport’s most popular driver won the title.

Hendrick Motorsports’ Chase Elliott took the checkered flag ahead of Team Penske teammates Brad Keselowski and Joey Logano as well as Joe Gibbs Racing’s Denny Hamlin at Phoenix Raceway in the Championship 4 to secure the 2020 NASCAR Cup Series championship, his first title in his fifth full season of competition.

Elliott started the 312-lap season finale around the four-turn, 1.022-mile (1.645-kilometer) oval in Avondale, Arizona from the rear of the field after he had been slated to start from the pole position due to the fact that his #9 Chevrolet failed pre-race inspection twice.

But he quickly battled his way through traffic and ended up leading more laps than anybody else with 153 laps led, including the last 43.

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Elliott had led 65 laps in a row in the third and final stage before making his final pit stop. When he came out of the pits, Logano was ahead of him due to the fact that he made the decision to pit one lap sooner to get onto new tires. But within nine laps, Elliott had taken back the lead, and he never looked back.

He hung on for his 11th career victory, all since August of 2018, and his career-high fifth win of the year. After winning last Sunday at Martinsville Speedway just to get into the Championship 4, this championship-sealing win also marked the first time he had ever won back-to-back races.

At the age of 24, he became the third youngest champion in Cup Series history and the youngest since a 24-year-old Jeff Gordon won the first of his four titles in 1995.

As a result, the Dawsonville, Georgia native ended a 32-year drought that had dated back to when his father Bill won the 1988 title.

Not since Bill won the championship 32 years ago had NASCAR’s most popular driver won the championship. That marked the fifth time the 16-time winner of the Most Popular Driver Award had won that award; he won it from 1984 through 1988 and then from 1991 through 2000 after Darrell Waltrip won it in 1989 and 1990.

He also won it in 2002 after Dale Earnhardt was awarded it posthumously in 2001, and he then withdrew his name from future ballots. From 2003 through 2017, it was Dale Earnhardt Jr. who secured the award.

While Waltrip is a three-time champion and Dale Sr. was a seven-time champion, none of those drivers ever won the award in seasons when they won the title.

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Of course, Elliott hasn’t officially been crowned the winner of the Most Popular Driver Award this year, but that is pretty much a given and will likely be a given for however long he competes, just as it was when Dale Jr. was competing up until his retirement three seasons ago. He handily won the award in both 2018 and 2019.

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