Back to News

December 20, 2024

Chase Elliott 2024 season in review


Editor’s note: This continues the series in which we review each 2024 NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs driver in reverse order of championship finish.

Season in review:
Chase Elliott, No. 9, Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet
Crew chief: Alan Gustafson
Final 2024 ranking: 7th
Key stats: One win, 11 top fives, 19 top 10s, one pole, 431 laps led

How 2024 ended: A year after missing the Cup Series Playoffs for the first time in his championship career, Elliott answered with a strong title run in 2024. He earned top-10 finishes in seven of the 10 playoff races, including a playoff-best showing of runner-up at Bristol Motor Speedway and Martinsville Speedway, the race that set the Championship 4. The 2020 champ was eliminated from title contention in the penultimate round. He led 218 laps in the 10-race post-season stretch — more than half his laps led all season. Ultimately, he finished seventh in the championship — an eighth top-10 finish in the championship in nine full-time seasons.

Best race: Elliott earned his only victory — first in two seasons — on the high banks at Texas Motor Speedway in April. He led 39 laps, including the final 17 in an overtime thriller, to claim the win and his ticket to the 2024 playoffs. It was his 19th career Cup Series win and his first series win ever at Texas, a venue where he scored his first career Xfinity Series win in 2014 at 18 years old.

RELATED: Elliott wins Texas thriller in double-overtime

Other season highlights: Elliott put together three top-10 streaks of at least three races over the season. First, early in the year at Richmond Raceway, Martinsville and Texas. Again from Pocono Raceway, Indianapolis Motor Speedway to the Richmond fall race. Finally, he ended the season with three straight top 10s at Homestead-Miami Speedway, Martinsville and Phoenix Raceway. He led double-digit laps seven times, including a season-best 129 laps in his runner-up finish in the Martinsville playoff race. Six of his top-five finishes were top-three showings – the win at Texas, runner-up efforts at Bristol and Martinsville (fall) and third-place finishes at Martinsville (spring), Kansas Speedway (spring) and Iowa Speedway. Elliott also opened the season with 19 straight top-20 finishes.

Stat to know: Elliott’s return to winning form means he’s won at least one race in six of the last seven seasons. His double-digit top-five and top-10 efforts matched a standard he’s had in seven of the last eight years. He was running at the finish at all but two races — tying another career-high mark, along with his average finish of 11.7 being his best mark since 2021 (11.4).

Quotable: “I find a lot of pride in our closing three or four weeks of the season, and just our performance, I thought, was in a really good spot. When I think about that and if we can just carry that forward to next year, I think we’ll have a lot of great opportunities. And I think we intend to do that.

“… We were really, really solid in a lot of areas, truthfully. The two things we didn’t do, unfortunately, were the most important things, and that’s leading laps and winning more races. We were leading more laps there at the end of the season, and those are the types of things that give you more opportunities.” — Elliott on closing the season.

MORE: Chase Elliott grades his ’24 campaign, looks ahead to next year

Looking ahead: Elliott was encouraged with the way this season finished and in particular, his three top-10 finishes to close out the race calendar. It’s the kind of momentum his team hopes to immediately capitalize on in the new year. Capturing the win at Texas means he’s now earned victories at 15 different tracks — from short tracks to famed road courses and from the superspeedway to 1.5-milers that make up the majority of the schedule. Elliott is optimistic that 2025 is a chance to show the Alan Gustafson-led team is back to the kind of form that produced five consecutive multi-win years from 2018-2022 and included the 2020 NASCAR Cup Series championship. Expectations are high on the No. 9 team, and that’s exactly what Elliott insists upon.

MUST WATCH