BAD NEWS: NASCAR Fans and Ferrari Teammates Shed Tears and Pray Together for Chase Elliott and His Family After Heartbreaking Announcement👇
It was a day that rewrote NASCAR forever. As the Winston Cup Series championship race came to an end, Bill Elliott extended his hand from his No. 11 Budweiser Ford’s window to celebrate. However, a quietly calculative Alan Kulwicki had pulled off the impossible already…
It’s been a year since Chase Elliott won a Cup Series race, a drought that played a role in NASCAR’s most popular driver missing the playoffs in what’s guaranteed to be the worst season of his career.
As Elliott returns for Sunday’s race at Talladega Superspeedway, site of his last victory, there’s no sugarcoating his season.
“I am disappointed in his season, for sure,” team owner Rick Hendrick told The Associated Press. “I think Chase is an unbelievable talent, the most popular driver, under a lot of pressure from the fans, not as much from the sponsors — they want to win. I feel like he deserves to win races, he’s got the talent. So we’ve just got to get him in that position.”
It fell apart for Elliott before the third race of the season when he broke his leg in a snowboarding accident in Colorado ahead of the race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Elliott missed six races to put him in an enormous hole, and then he was suspended for a seventh for intentionally wrecking Denny Hamlin in the Coca-Cola 600 in May.
He spent the rest of the regular season desperately trying to win a race to avoid missing out on the playoffs for the first time in his career. Elliott failed to qualify — his 35-race winless streak dates to last fall’s Talladega race — and a career-worst 17th is the best he can finish in the final Cup standings. The 2020 champion never has finished lower than 10th and made it to the title-deciding finale the last three years.
Hendrick has given Elliott a directive to win a race before the end of the season to carry momentum into 2024.
