HOMESTEAD, Fla. — Chase Elliott currently occupies the cellar in the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs’ eight-driver field, sitting an unenviable 53 points below the provisional elimination line. Two events remain in the postseason’s Round of 8 for him to claim a championship-race berth in the Nov. 10 finale at Phoenix Raceway, but Elliott says a radically different approach to those looming weekends won’t better his case.
Elliott’s next opportunity arrives with Sunday’s Straight Talk Wireless 400 (2:30 p.m. ET, NBC, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, NBC Sports App) at Homestead-Miami Speedway, where the No. 9 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet driver aims to give his playoff fate a boost. Going for broke, waving a magic wand and deviating from what’s gotten him here, Elliott says, isn’t in his team’s playbook.
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“You get in these situations, and I think everyone just feels like you’re going to reinvent the wheel to go and win a race, and that’s just not how it works,” said Elliott, the Cup Series champ in 2020. “I don’t have a magic ‘go win’ button. If I did, I’d press it every week. So it’s just, that’s just not how this works. So what you do is, you have to have a base of where you’re at and the things that you do well, and you have things that you don’t do well, and you just try to improve, and you try to make it better. For us, we’ve got to get into a position where we’re qualifying better, where we’re leading more laps and running inside the top five more throughout the event.
“Those are all things that give you opportunities to win, not just some ‘Hail Mary’ that you’re going to hit one in a million on and hope that it’s in the next two weeks. That’s just silly. The odds of that happening are slim to none, at least for me. It doesn’t seem like it works out like that.”
Elliott landed in this precarious playoff spot after his No. 9 Chevy sustained damage in a Stage 2 crash at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. The tangle also snared fellow playoff drivers Tyler Reddick and Ryan Blaney, and all three finished outside the top 30 to tumble onto the negative side of the postseason bubble.
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Elliott’s lone victory this season came at another 1.5-mile track, 24 races ago at Texas Motor Speedway in mid-April. He said during a midweek availability that he’s in need of another.
“I think that we’re in a position where we have to win one of the next two,” said Elliott, who would reach career Cup Series win No. 20 upon his next trip to Victory Lane. “That was our thought process going into Vegas. So, while it didn’t work out for us, and we ended up worse than what we went in, I don’t think the goals change at all. So this was really the position that we’ve kind of viewed ourselves in the whole time. So I think we just, yeah, keep the hammer down and try to get a win in one of these next two weeks.”