WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. — A critical fuel miscalculation in the penultimate race of the NASCAR Cup Series regular season left Chase Elliott in a must-win position to make the NASCAR Playoffs.
Elliott finished 32nd, one lap down, in Sunday’s race at Watkins Glen International, the result of his No. 9 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet running out of fuel at Lap 55 and bringing out the only caution of the 90-lap race.
The defending Regular Season Champion enters next week’s regular-season finale at Daytona International Speedway 21st in driver points, 101 points beneath the line to advance into the postseason. Elliott will need to win at the 2.5-mile superspeedway to qualify for the playoffs, which he has never missed in seven previous seasons.
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“Clearly a miscalculation with the 9 car and that was huge,” said Jeff Gordon, vice chairman of Hendrick Motorsports. “He came in a little bit short the first stop (at Lap 17) and so they were trying to stretch it to get closer on the strategy of the others. And you always want to pad yourself here just in case there’s a lot of restarts at the end, and the fuel just wasn’t there. So it was really unfortunate.”
Elliott qualified 15th for Sunday’s race and had worked to 13th place before his first pit stop. The move netted Elliott six positions, getting him to seventh after the running order cycled through. The gamble to stretch it fell short and the No. 9 car came to a halt in the run-off area of the bus-stop chicane, forcing the yellow flag to fly and ending any chance of an Elliott victory.
“You can’t do the same thing and expect a different result than everybody else, right?” crew chief Alan Gustafson said.
The risk was necessary, though, with Elliott entering the contest 80 points out of a playoff position and just Watkins Glen and Daytona left as their opportunities to advance to the postseason.
“To win, you have to have very little margin, right?” Gustafson said. “I mean, that’s what winning is. You’re gonna make sure you exploit everything to the highest percentile possible, so anytime you’re trying to push, yeah, you’re cutting margin. So that gets riskier and riskier.”
Asked if the empty fuel tank was indeed the result of a miscalculation, Gustafson said: “I’m not going to go over our internal stuff in the media.”
Elliott, who was not available for comment post-race, has three career wins in superspeedway-style races, with two at Talladega Superspeedway and one at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
The 2020 Cup Series champion will search for his first Daytona triumph en route to a playoff berth on Saturday night (7 ET, NBC, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, Peacock).