Much has been made about the struggles of Hendrick Motorsports and Chevrolet, and, frankly, any non-Toyota team during the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series season. But where NASCAR's winningest all-time organization is concerned, it's been a particularly stunning letdown.
Kyle Larson, the defending series champion, hasn't won a race in well over a calendar year. William Byron is also winless in 2026. Alex Bowman looks like a shell of himself after missing a handful of races due to vertigo symptoms, and he's already announced that 2027 will be his final season.
Then there's Chase Elliott. At one point this year, the 2020 series champion was having arguably his most impressive campaign of the Next Gen Era under the circumstances. Now? He hasn't finished in the top 10 in nine races.
And it's not going unnoticed.
The No. 9 team is back to their regularly scheduled programming again, and there are no excuses for it
The stalest individual race team in NASCAR, with only the possible exception of Joey Logano's No. 22 group, is having yet another one of their trademark summer slumps. The speed has been nonexistent. The execution has been a disaster. And even the driver, normally one of the least mistake-prone competitors in the series, is getting desperate.
At Iowa Speedway, Elliott spun in practice, forcing the team to make repairs. Once they did, the car ran in the 30s and fell a lap down on pace during the opening stage. He gained track position through strategy, but then a pit stop that could have been timed with a sundial sent him right back where he came from. He ultimately finished 15th after another unconventional call from Alan Gustafson and somehow this felt like a victory.
That's where we are. A driver who, throughout his first seven seasons in the Cup Series, was considered a generational talent, is now relegated to having to consider 15th-place finishes "good points days".
It's beyond unacceptable.
The alarm bells have been ringing on the No. 9 group for four years now. Elliott hasn't won more than two races in a season since 2022 and hasn't qualified on the pole on speed since that same year either. If this was any other championship-level driver in NASCAR history, the entire system around him would have been nuked by now.
Gustafson is still long past his expiration date, despite him being the only guy who didn't screw up at Iowa. It's extremely telling that Elliott was the class of the field during the first year of the Next Gen car, when pure driver skill largely dictated performance, before everybody except for his team figured out how to engineer the vehicle.
The crew chief is the reason the No. 9 has lacked in speed when the other Hendrick cars were fast, and his strategy calls have hurt his driver more often than they've helped.
It's been 11 years of this pairing and it's not meeting the standard anymore. Any serious team would make themselves uncomfortable and try something different, but not this one, which treats Gustafson like a college football coach at a program with limited resources where his job is safe as long as he goes .500 every year with the occasional bowl game win.
For the past two years, top media profiles have carried water for Gustafson and the No. 9 team and made a sport out of dunking on frustrated Elliott fans by pointing out how consistent his results have been, which was laughable because everybody knew it meant nothing under the old championship format. Now the format is gone, and the Most Popular Driver and company are still badly underachieving. What gives?
Hendrick's struggles on the whole are not an excuse. Chase's own mistakes, largely a product of overdriving the bricks he's being supplied with every week, are not an excuse. This team has had every excuse in the book made for it for close to a half-decade now and they stopped being valid a long time ago. It's time for changes. It's been time.
The best time for a full reset of everybody involved with the No. 9 team besides the driver was after the 2023 season. The second-best time is right now. The longer we avoid the hard conversations, the longer we are watching what should be the prime of one of the best drivers in the sport be utterly wasted.
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