Chase Elliott has had it with the NASCAR playoffs, even though that same playoff system helped him win the 2020 Cup championship.
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The veteran Hendrick Motorsports driver on Friday called upon NASCAR to eliminate the 16-driver, four-round playoff structure and revert back to the way it used to be in his father Bill’s era: a full-season points system.
“We’ve had a really good and competitive battle to the regular season (championship) over the last two or three years,” Elliot said during media availability Friday at Indianapolis. “It’s really been pretty tight all the way down to (the end of the 26-race regular season finale) Daytona.
“If you just take that as your sample set over the first 26 weeks, it looks pretty solid to me.”
That’s when Elliott, who comes into this Sunday’s Brickyard 400 atop the NASCAR Cup standings, dropped his bombshell.
“The system would be just fine if you just had a full season (and no playoffs),” Elliott said. “And if somebody runs away with it, so what? Let’s celebrate the fact that somebody ran away with it, that somebody was just that good.”
“Motorsports does not have to be like everybody else to be successful. And I’ll stand by that till I get done (retires).”
Elliott Has At Least One Fellow Driver In His Corner
Even though they’ve had their differences and run-ins on the racetrack, another guy who has the playoff system to thank for his earning the Cup championship in 2012 is Brad Keselowski, who agrees with Elliott’s take on a full-season points system.
“Strikes me just now, part of what’s holding the Nextgen car back in popularity is that the parity it has generated can’t be recognized and celebrated in a playoff format,” Keselowski wrote on X/Twitter.
“The small sample size of races in the current format creates a natural oblivious state to the excellence this car requires from teams and drivers to get weekly results. Or in short: What Chase said.”
But Elliott is also a realist. He and his fellow drivers can say how much they hate the current playoff system 24/7, but their comments aren’t going to change anything. It’s up to NASCAR’s top officials to decide if the current playoff system should continue, or whether it’s run its course.
“It’s a situation that I’m never going to have the keys to, and neither are y’all (the media),” Elliott said. “It’s fun to talk about and I appreciate that, but we don’t make the rules, right?”
