Five-race schedule features short tracks, historic venues
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Before Chase Elliott embarks on the heady task of taking Jeff Gordon's spot at Hendrick Motorsports in 2016, he'll be dipping his toe in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series waters with a partial schedule this season. That five-race audition, though, is no string of uncontested layups.
The hand-picked slate for Elliott in 2015 is purposely a mixed bag of challenging tracks, all intended to give the defending XFINITY Series champ a demanding dose of seat time before he goes full-bore as a Sunoco Rookie of the Year candidate in NASCAR's top division.
"You know, it doesn't do you any good to pick the easiest tracks or the best track," team owner Rick Hendrick said last week during the annual Charlotte Motor Speedway Media Tour. "If we're going to have a rough race, then I'd rather have it in these five and a learning experience than when we get into it for real, when the points are counting and we're trying to get into the Chase for his rookie year."
The 19-year-old driver, set for his second full XFINITY Series season this year with Hendrick Motorsports affiliate JR Motorsports, is scheduled to make his Sprint Cup debut in the No. 25 Chevrolet on March 29 at Martinsville Speedway, NASCAR's shortest track and among the sport's trickiest. From there, Elliott will tackle another short track April 25 at Richmond International Raceway before turning his attention toward stock-car racing's longest event: The Coca-Cola 600 on May 24 at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
Elliott wraps his first Sprint Cup foray with two more historic venues -- July 26 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway and Sept. 6 at Darlington Raceway -- completing what Hendrick called "a good spread," with the races spaced out by design. With the NASCAR-mandated ban on testing taking effect this year, Hendrick said adding a degree of difficulty to the five-race schedule was crucial to help Elliott develop a feel for Sprint Cup competition.
"It's going to be really hard for a guy like Chase not to have tests," the 65-year-old team owner said. "We're throwing him into some really tough races, but you know it's going to be the same for everybody and it'll be a learning curve. Hopefully there'll be enough tire tests that we'll get some tests and feedback. It's going to be the same for everyone, but I think the rookies are the ones that are really going to have to pay the price because they're just not going to have the availability to have track time."
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The architects of Elliott's limited schedule were Hendrick Motorsports executive vice president and general manager Doug Duchardt, plus the team's array of crew chiefs -- all working in conjunction with the youngster and his father, newly minted NASCAR Hall of Famer Bill Elliott. According to the younger Elliott, the scope of his early Sprint Cup itinerary was taking shape for 2015 even before Gordon's decision to step aside.
"I think more or less, it was just to try to gain some experience," Chase Elliott said. "... That was just something that came up and it was an opportunity. (Team sponsor) NAPA was interested in doing it, and those five races were obviously something I was interested in doing and we kind of planned that out. That was all before anything else came out with Jeff."
Elliott has competed in XFINITY Series races at four of the five tracks on his 2015 Sprint Cup schedule. The only exception on the list is Martinsville, where he placed sixth and 20th in a pair of Camping World Truck Series events in 2013.
Still, a lack of experience hasn't been much of an impediment for Elliott thus far. The boy wonder stifled a star-studded field loaded with Sprint Cup regulars to score his first XFINITY win last April at Texas Motor Speedway, then followed that with two more Victory Lane celebrations -- at Darlington and Chicagoland Speedway -- helping him clinch the crown with one race left on the schedule.
"I don't see a problem," Bill Elliott said. "I think you can take the kid anywhere from what I saw this year from the XFINITY side, the way he competed. We talked a little bit about it and he said, 'I really don't want to do the speedway stuff because you really don't learn a lot about the race car at those places.' It's more about just positioning and that sort of thing. He'd rather go ... to those kind of places that you learn more about the car that will teach him more down the road, and I think that's what's important to him."