Chase Elliott is out of the gloomiest season of his career at Mr. Hendrick’s team and looks forward to regaining the winning momentum that got him the 2020 Cup Series championship. Still, his fans might feel that had he just not gone snowboarding last year, things wouldn’t have been this bad. While that’s debatable, shockingly Rick Hendrick himself took the news of Elliott’s injury in a quite unexpected way.
Advertisement
In a recent episode of The Dale Jr. Download, Elliott opened up about the moment he knew he had messed up. “I’m like, alright, who do I call? How am I gonna go about this? I hadn’t got my X-rays back but I had a pretty good feeling I couldn’t walk. My knee was about this big already…I was gonna miss the weekend,” he recalled.
“I text Alan (Gustafson) and said hey, can I call you we got a problem because I knew he was gonna be the one facilitating getting somebody else in the car and he needs to know and I was too scared to call Rick (Hendrick) at this point,” Elliott smiled.
Considering how important Chase Elliott is to the Chevy team, it’s normal for someone to expect Rick Hendrick to have lost his mind and perhaps even be mad at his driver. But none of that happened.
Elliott continued, “Believe it or not…I was shocked, (he) took every bit of it just awesome and he didn’t even care about the weekend. He was just more worried what was the process, how bad was it when was surgery gonna be if I needed surgery, if he could do anything to help and how long were we looking.”
Chase Elliott to honor Dale Earnhardt Jr. running this special scheme
Hendrick Motorsports announced that this year’s race at Darlington Raceway on May 13 is going to be a special one, given that it’s ‘Throwback Weekend.’ Chase Elliott will pilot his #9 Chevrolet with the same paint scheme that Junior drove to victory lane in the 2015 Daytona 500.
Needless to say, it’s a huge honor for the NASCAR Hall of Famer as well as Elliott.
See you in Darlington on May 12th. pic.twitter.com/JcLP8QRZ8U
— Hendrick Motorsports (@TeamHendrick) March 20, 2024
Junior’s surprise knew no bounds when Elliott told him that the latter was still in high school when Junior won the race. Elliott will be sponsored by UniFirst, which has agreed to change the traditional colors on the car. Earnhardt felt especially appreciative of that.
The two shook their hands and hoped that the car would be fast enough to bag the win.
