Chase Elliott knows what it feels like to have salt rubbed into a wound. It’s bad enough that the former NASCAR Cup champion was involved in a Stage 2 wreck with Kyle Busch, ending Elliott’s night and finishing last in the 38-driver field in Saturday night’s race at Richmond Raceway.
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But earlier in the race, Elliott received a vehicle interference penalty, which put him behind the eight ball long before the fateful contact with Busch. NASCAR invoked the penalty upon Elliott for cutting the pit box of Chase Briscoe, when Briscoe’s No. 19 car was already in the box and narrowly avoiding contact between the two cars in NASCAR’s eyes.
While the Hendrick Motorsports driver felt he didn’t do anything wrong, officials thought otherwise and assessed the penalty. “It seems like that’s happened a lot lately,” Elliott said of cars cutting pit boxes of drivers directly behind their own pit stall on a stop.
“It’s a really tough position, especially when you’re directly behind the car that’s pitted right behind your stall because the front tire carriers are carrying two tires. You get in a position where if I get too far over to the right, I’m going to be stopped and now he’s not going to be able to get out of his box.
“Obviously, I’m not trying to hit his guys. I would never intentionally do that or try and make him get further left. That’s not my intent at all. I don’t want to get in a position where I’m angled so far in that now I’ve blocked him in and we have a bad angle for our stop.”
Elliott accepted his penalty, even though he didn’t agree with it
Even though he did not agree with NASCAR’s ruling, Elliott begrudgingly accepted it.
“All I was trying to do was just take as much room as I could to get back straight and not cause another issue at the end of the pit stop,” Elliott said. “It was nothing beyond that. Obviously, I got too aggressive with it, but it was an unfortunate situation.”
