On Sunday, the NASCAR Cup Series will make its return to Texas Motor Speedway, the site of Chase Elliott’s most recent victory last spring. And on the surface, Elliott rolls up to Fort Worth in as good a form as he’s had in a while. He currently ranks fourth in the Cup standings, tracking for his first placement that high since he made the Championship 4 in 2022. He’s coming off a top-five finish last week at Talladega, and he hasn’t finished outside the Top 20 in any of his 10 starts so far in 2025. Elliott is also tied with Tyler Reddick for the sixth-highest odds (+1000) to win this year’s Cup championship, according to DraftKings, which puts him squarely in the mix to win his second career title — surpassing his father, Bill, whose sole title came in 1988.
Under the hood of all that, however, is a fascinating change in how Elliott has achieved his recent success.
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In previous years, Elliott was a threat to win most weekends. From 2018 to 2022, he took 18 checkered flags in 180 races — good for a 10.0% winning percentage, second only to Kevin Harvick at 12.8%. He never had a season with fewer than two wins — winning three or more races four times and five or more races on two occasions. And during that span, he never went longer than 26 races without a victory, usually recording his wins after waits of fewer than 15 starts:
More recently, however, Elliott has found Victory Lane a lot harder to drive to. Starting late in the 2022 season, he embarked on what would eventually be a 42-race winless streak before winning the 2024 Autotrader EchoPark Automotive 400 at Texas last April. And any hopes that would break the seal on another stretch of frequent Elliott wins were misplaced – after this past weekend, Elliott is on a 37-race winless streak dating back to that victory at Texas a year ago. For those not keeping track, that means Elliott has won just one of his past 80 Cup starts, a stretch that is verging on matching the 1 win he had in his first 99 career races.
Overall, since the start of 2023, Elliott has a mere 1.3% winning percentage, far from that 10% figure from the preceding five seasons. This is reflective of a general trend of fewer high-tier performances from the No. 9 car in recent seasons. Expand things to look at other finishes, and only 28% of Elliott’s races have ended with him in the top five and 53% within the top 10, compared with rates of 36% and 55%, respectively, earlier on:
At the same time, Elliott has all but eliminated the really bad outings from his stat sheet. During that 2018-2022 period, he finished outside the top 20 in 22% of his starts — and outside the top 30 in 12% of them. From 2023-2025, by comparison, only 12% of Elliott’s races have seen him finish outside the top 20, and 9% outside the top 30. Even as his week-to-week ceiling has appeared to lower, the floor on Elliott’s performances has seemed to rise, making him a model of consistency: He almost never suffers a bad day.
We can see this shift in Elliott’s strength as a driver by examining his rankings across various stats. Specifically, let’s look at three numbers: Average Finish, Average Driver Rating and my Adjusted Points+ Index (which assigns drivers exponentially more points for higher finishes, scaled to a Cup Series average of 100). The first of the three rewards consistency more, while giving less upside to winning — it treats the difference between first and fifth the same as between 21st and 25th. The second rewards consistent dominance throughout races, if not at the end of them in terms of finishes. And the third gives disproportionate rewards to high finishes, making minimal distinctions between finishes outside the top 20.
During Elliott’s heyday for winning races, he generally (though not always) tended to rank more highly in Driver Rating and Adjusted Points+ than Average Finish, indicating that he was dominating on his best days, even if his results were occasionally dragged down by bad luck or inconsistency. Starting in 2023, however, his rankings in Driver Rating and Adjusted Points+ began to dip well below his rank in Average Finish, where he was the No. 1 driver in the sport last season and ranks third this year — despite sitting fifth in Adjusted Points+ and ninth in Driver Rating:
Meanwhile, other Elliott indicators are trending toward less dominance as well. After going a combined 333-207 head-to-head (a 61.7% winning percentage) in races against his Hendrick Motorsports teammates from 2018-2022, he fell to 51-36 (58.6%) in 2023, 54-54 (50.0%) last season and is 12-18 (40.0%) this year. That’s tracking to be his first losing season head-to-head versus teammates since going 4-16 (20.0%) in a partial schedule driving the No. 25 car during his rookie Cup season of 2015 at age 19.
What are we supposed to make of all this? Certainly, the change in risk/reward balance hasn’t left Elliott’s standings placement any worse for ware. Again, he sits comfortably in fourth place, trailing only a couple of teammates — William Byron and Kyle Larson — plus Denny Hamlin. And he will be a threat to win at plenty of locations coming up on the Cup calendar: He ranks No. 7 this weekend in projected Driver Rating according to my track-scouting system, which ought to also correlate with good projections at similar tracks in Kansas, Charlotte and Michigan. Then comes a stretch with three road courses in five races, a theoretical bonus for a driver who at one time was known as the best regular road-racer in NASCAR.
But while piling up solid points days is good in and of itself, especially during the regular season (when the standings reward a steady hand at the wheel), Elliott’s championship potential will probably ride on whether he can consistently find that winning gear again — a surprising turn of events for a driver who made victories look routine just a few years ago.