For the past three NASCAR Cup Series seasons, one of the easiest ways to determine if someone is a true knower of wheel or not is by their opinion on the performance of Chase Elliott and his No. 9 team.
Box score watchers will tell you everything is fine, because Elliott is so consistent. He rarely makes mistakes that put his team in a bad spot, and as a result, he always has a strong average finish. But those who actually pay close attention realize that that's not good enough, especially in today's NASCAR.
Let's look beyond the obvious fact that championships haven't been determined by average finish for more than 20 years (and good riddance). As a general rule, anything involving what most NASCAR fans view as "consistency" is always predicated on the absence of bad luck, and in recent weeks, those fortunes have regressed for Elliott in a major way.
Chase Elliott's luck has finally run out, and it might be the best possible thing for him
Through the first 23 races of 2025, Elliott didn't have a single finish outside the top 20. In the six events since then, he's had three.
The first, at Watkins Glen International, was a result of poor execution on pit strategy. The second, at Richmond Raceway, was due to being swept up in a wreck not of his making. Only the most recent one, at Bristol Motor Speedway on Saturday, can be blamed even partially on a driver mistake, when contact with John Hunter Nemechek resulted in a 38th place DNF.
So, despite Elliott driving the same way he always drives, his results have fallen apart. Imagine that. Never seen this one before (or vice versa). Maybe, just maybe, winning and leading races on a regular basis is more predictive of championship-level performance than "racing not to lose".
Anyway, during this stretch, Elliott has dropped from second place in the full-season points (which, since the playoffs have started, are irrelevant anyway) to sixth. He's gone from leading the Cup Series in average finish to third.
Despite advancing in the playoffs, he is set to start the round of 12 only five points above the round of 8 cutoff. With another stretch of races like this, make no mistake: he will be eliminated in the round of 12 for the first time since 2016.
While Elliott was skating by, simply by avoiding terminal issues, fans could ignore the fact that he has only two wins since the start of the 2023 season after accumulating 18 in the previous five, or the fact that he's racked up fewer laps led (1,023) in that span than he had during his 2020 championship campaign alone (1,247) – or the fact that even on the rare occasion when the No. 9 team has dominant speed, they seem to find a way to turn it into a "good points day" instead of a win.
None of this is to say Elliott is the problem. He didn't randomly forget how to drive in his late 20s. It's not that he couldn't adjust to the Next Gen car, as he was the best driver in the sport during its first season. It wasn't his broken leg at the start of 2023, which is ancient history by now.
But the No. 9 team lost something in the speed department during the 2022 playoffs, and they have yet to get it back.
Elliott has been long overdue for a full reset of the group around him. He needs to be back in the winner's circle on the regular and competing for titles every year, and as long as people keep pretending the No. 9 team's current standard is acceptable, it's not going to happen.
With another season destined to end shy of the Championship 4, there is no choice but to address the hard truth and make major personnel changes to help revitalize NASCAR's Most Popular Driver.