This year, NASCAR has paid quite some attention to road courses as far as having them on its schedule is concerned. Unlike how NASCAR used to have just two road course races earlier, the 2024 schedule has five of them, and more importantly, two out of those are in the playoffs itself. Indeed, that is great news for Chase Elliott.
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Mostly because the 28-year-old driver now has the opportunity to catch the progress of Tony Stewart and the legendary Jeff Gordon on road courses. There was a time when Stewart was a master of packing speed at Watkins Glen. With five victories, Stewart still remains the winningest driver at ‘The Glen.’ With a total of eight wins at NASCAR’s road courses, the SHR boss narrowly tails Gordon, who has nine road course triumphs.
From Watkins Glen in 1997 to Sonoma in 2000, Gordon was in a league of his own. Within that period, Gordon won six road races in a row, and by the time he achieved his ninth road course win in 2006, he was considered the undisputed king of road racing in NASCAR.
Nevertheless, Elliot’s prowess is not to be taken lightly either. Among the seven road races that he has won, the Dawsonville native picked up four of them in a row from Watkins Glen in 2019 to the Charlotte ROVAL race in 2020. T
herefore, Elliott is just two wins shy from tying Gordon and three wins away from shattering his record.
Chase Elliott reveals that he has not been living up to his own expectations
2023 was arguably Elliott’s worst season. Not only did he not advance into the playoffs, but he even failed to record a single win last year. Needless to say, when talking about which drivers needed the biggest rebounds going into 2024, Elliott’s name was at the top of the list. However, Chase Elliott wouldn’t call it a rebound.
“It’s not about rebounding or whatever,” Elliott explained. “It’s just getting to the level that we feel we’re capable of achieving. And that’s really all that matters to me.”
“But I think more than anything, we just have not been performing and I have not been performing as I expect of myself, and like we expect of our team,” he added as per Fox Sports.
The #9 driver is trying to keep his goal quite simple for this year. He wants to identify what he is capable of doing and wants to get to that point consistently every weekend. Elliott admitted that his team has been trying to identify their loopholes for several months now, and now that they’ve done it, the only thing left to do is to just work and try to find solutions.
