LONG POND, Pa. — Chase Elliott has arguably had the most consistent start of anyone in the NASCAR Cup Series this season. But consistency, he said, isn’t quite enough.
The 2020 series champion has finished inside the top 20 in each of the opening 16 races of 2025 and enters Pocono Raceway on the heels of a season-best third-place finish in Mexico City. The season has started well for the Georgia native, but he admitted Saturday that he and his team are looking to raise their ceiling ahead of The Great American Getaway 400 (2 p.m. ET, Prime Video, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
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“The consistency, it’s good, but this deal really rewards winning,” Elliott said.
Elliott has put together an impressive 11.2 average finish to open the year, enough for third-best among all full-time drivers, with four top fives and eight top 10s. The 29-year-old is careful to downplay the success he and his team have accrued this season while seeking improved performance. While his Hendrick teammates Kyle Larson (851) and William Byron (769) top the series in laps led, Elliott ranks 11th with 95 circuits led as he navigates a 43-race winless streak.
“It’s not where I want to be, no doubt,” Elliott said. “I think that for us, there’s been some high spots. And to be honest, there’s been weeks where we’ve run well or maybe had a good finish — or even there’s been a couple weeks where we haven’t necessarily had a good finish — and I can go home and be like, ‘Man, we were in the mix. We had good pace today.’ And those are the weeks that (you want). You want to just feel like you’re in the ball game as it pertains to pace and doing the right things and getting up in there and giving yourself a shot. Those days, I can go home and have something to be proud of.
“It’s the days and weekends where we’re just not even relevant that I think are really the most frustrating to me. And we’ve had more of those than I want to have and that we want to have as a team. So I think it’s been good. It’s not satisfactory to myself or to our team, but there’s still a lot of racing left in the season.”
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Resiliency has been a key part of the No. 9 team’s results this season. Even when strategy has gone awry — like at Michigan, where cautions derailed pit strategy and dropped Elliott from contending for the lead instead dropping him to a 15th-place finish — the group has been able to walk away with a reasonable amount of points in their pocket. Elliott enters Pocono fourth in the points standings, 104 points off Byron for the series lead, but 146 points above the provisional elimination line to the Cup Series Playoffs as the highest non-winner in the standings.
“I think our team has done a really good job taking some of those days where we were not having a good day and digging in, and finding a way to just get something halfway decent out of it,” Elliott said. “Sometimes that can be a really hard thing to do, and I am really proud of them for that. Because it’s easy to throw in the towel on those days, just lose it and be done and go try again next week. But we as a whole, we don’t know any better and we just keep trying, keep pushing, and make the most out of whatever the day has brought us.”