When the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series season began, many wondered how the Chevrolets would perform with their new bodies. Through five races, the manufacturer is still searching for its first win of the season after Denny Hamlin's dominant performance at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on Sunday.
Hamlin admitted after the race that Tyler Reddick's three consecutive wins to begin the season "fueled" him, giving Toyota four victories so far this year. After Reddick's historic start, it was Team Penske's Ryan Blaney who became the first driver not named Reddick to win a race this season at Phoenix Raceway, leaving Chevrolet as the only manufacturer without a victory through five races.
However, the 1.5-mile track in Sin City presented Chevrolet with arguably its best opportunity to secure that first win of the season, particularly for Hendrick Motorsports. While William Byron and Kyle Larson entered the weekend with four combined wins there, they came away empty-handed with finishes of third and seventh, respectively.
The driver who made the biggest statement was runner-up Chase Elliott. Sure, Byron and Larson led a combined 88 laps, but NASCAR's most popular driver was able to methodically work his way up through the field after qualifying 15th and was even running Hamlin down in the closing laps before the checkered flag waved.
Chase Elliott has encouraging race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway
With Elliott and Byron both inside the top five, the new Chevrolet body had a solid debut on a 1.5-mile oval, and in a race that only featured one caution for incident. Elliott's performance, though, may have even overshadowed that when you consider the rough stretch he has gone through since the inception of the Next Gen car in 2022.
Yes, he equaled a career-high in wins with five in 2022, but that is when everything took a turn. Early in the 2023 season, Elliott fractured his leg in a snowboarding accident and missed six races. He was also suspended for one race after hooking Hamlin in the right rear during the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway. He ultimately missed the playoffs that season and failed to win a single race.
In the past two seasons, he has won a combined three races and has struggled to consistently run at the front of the field. By comparison, Larson and Byron have 15 wins between them during that span and led a total of 4,492 laps. Elliott, meanwhile, only paced the field for 885 laps in 2024 and 2025, which is far from the career-high 1,247 he led during his 2020 championship-winning season.
A major area of focus for Elliott coming out of 2025 was qualifying after he averaged a 16.1 average starting position. He still managed to post a better average finish (12.6) than his teammates, but the inconsistency on Saturdays kept him from scoring valuable stage points and being among the frontrunners.
With only six top 10 finishes at Las Vegas coming into 2026, it would not have been a surprise if he struggled to find the balance once again on Sunday. However, from the drop of the green flag, it was apparent that Elliott had something to work with when he drove his way up into eighth by the end of the first stage and was mixing it up with Christopher Bell and Larson for the race lead in the second.
Aside from finishing fourth in the Daytona 500 after leading on the final lap, Elliott's only other top 10 finish this season before the Las Vegas race was a seventh place finish at Circuit of the Americas (COTA) that was made possible by the heads-up decision he made to pit under green prior to the caution flag coming out.
This Sunday's race at the famed Darlington Raceway will be the first of three in a row to utilize the new increased horsepower package that is expected to cause a lot of tire wear. The entire Hendrick Motorsports group was certainly not its best at Phoenix when that package made its oval debut, but that race also tied a track record for cautions (12).
It is still too early to jump to any conclusion or notion that Elliott's Las Vegas runner-up is a preview of what is ahead for the 2020 champion. However, as someone who sits fifth in points and is one of the most consistent drivers in the field, everyone better look out if he starts to put more runs together like we saw at Las Vegas.