MARTINSVILLE, Va. — Being a powerhouse NASCAR team has its advantages, but as Hendrick Motorsports has discovered in its 42 years of business, that perch comes with lofty and sometimes unrealistic expectations. Several other teams had gone through the first six races winless without so much as a ripple, but when Rick Hendrick’s four-car group has any sluggishness to its start, it’s more of a wave, complete with alarm bells sounding.
What’s wrong? Have they lost a step? Has the rest of the field caught up? The buzz had grown incrementally louder as the handful of losses began to mount.
As unusual as the mini-slump might have been, the place where the organization’s modest recent skid ended was no surprise. Martinsville Speedway has been there when Hendrick has needed it most, and the team’s senior-most driver and his trusted crew chief delivered in the clutch.
Chase Elliott provided an encouraging boost in Sunday’s Cook Out 400, denying a dominant Denny Hamlin and riding a gutsy Alan Gustafson strategy call to victory at one of NASCAR’s original tracks. The first win of the season for Elliott and Hendrick was also the first for Chevrolet after a six-race blanking, but far from the team’s first at the 0.526-mile track. As the Sunday sun began to set, a Martinsville deckhand wheeled yet another grandfather clock trophy up to the frontstretch stage, marking the organization’s record 31st Cup Series triumph here.
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Tyler Reddick has rightfully claimed his share of the headlines this year with four early wins, which stoked a stretch of five victories for Toyota just six races into the 2026 campaign. But Hendrick’s reliability at tried-and-true Martinsville provided Elliott & Co. with something to savor for an extra week, with the Cup Series idle during the Easter holiday.
“It’s the little things, man. You kind of definitely learn to enjoy that stuff,” Elliott said after his 22nd career Cup win, his second at Martinsville. “Yeah, just nice to kind of get to end this first stretch of the season going into the off week with the win is really cool. I mean, I know we still have a lot of room for improvement, don’t get me wrong, but great way to kind of cap off this first stretch. A lot of good momentum for the whole organization, honestly, I think.”
Crucially, the No. 9 team snatched the day’s momentum away from Hamlin, who led 292 of the 400 laps and seemingly had his second win of the season in hand. With Elliott running ninth just behind the fray of front-runners, Gustafson called Elliott to the pits on Lap 261, opting to roughly split the final and longest stage of the race into thirds with a two-stop strategy while other teams planned to make just one stop if the race went green.
The short-pit gamble eventually gave Elliott the lead with fresher tires as the pit cycle played out, and when a caution period for debris slowed the action on Lap 312, Elliott stopped again with the rest of the field — this time in second place behind Hamlin – to offset his tire deficit.
“It’s a risky call because you know you’re going two laps down, and if the caution comes out and you’re the first guy to do it, you can ruin your whole day,” Hendrick Motorsports vice chairman Jeff Gordon told NASCAR.com. “But at the same time, when it works out, if you look at the math, it looks like a better strategy in general to do two stops. It’s just when you do it here, you lose two laps under that pit road. So, they did a similar thing to this in ’24 and it worked out in their favor on that day, too. So I think if you ask Alan, he’s gonna say it’s probably not as risky maybe as it looks, but obviously paid off big-time today, and I couldn’t be happier for it to pay off for them and make that call.
“You’ve got to take risk in life. You’ve got to take risk in racing. They did it today, and then Chase got it done when he got up front.”
Indeed, Gustafson was asked, and his impressions mirrored Gordon’s. Mathematically, he said, the overall edge on tires favored making two stops, but the counterpoint was that such a strategy left the team vulnerable to the possibility of an ill-timed yellow flag.
“At the same time, you can’t sit on your hands and run 10th,” Gustafson said. “You’ve got to do something, right? I think that was the best shot.”
Elliott did the rest, and his post-race praise of Gustafson’s leadership spoke volumes. The pair form the longest-running driver/crew chief pairing in the Cup Series garage, and Gustafson has drawn the larger share of social-media flak when dry spells have arisen. Elliott said he thought little of it when the team’s strategy veered from the norm — “I’ve told him this throughout the course of the season, ‘Hey, look, whatever you want to do, rip it.'” His unwavering support of Gustafson’s efforts was rewarded.
“It’s a great call. Glad he picked up on that, saw that. I don’t think anybody else did,” Elliott said. “Goes to show that he’s pretty good at what he does, which I try to tell y’all that all the time. But he does a pretty good job. I’m happy to work with him. Appreciate his effort, hanging in there, to our whole team for doing that, too. I appreciate that out of all of ’em.”
Gordon has noticed that commitment, too, from two perspectives. As a driver, he teamed with Gustafson for 11 Cup Series wins during Gordon’s last five full-time seasons (2011-15). As a team executive, he’s witnessed Gustafson’s confidence atop the pit box, a trait that’s helped override some of the noise from his detractors.
“You’ve always seen this, right? Whether it was Dale Earnhardt Jr. or Chase Elliott, whoever is the popular driver in the series, there’s a lot of critics that want to sit on the sidelines and evaluate it,” Gordon said. “You cannot let that tear you apart. You got to keep strong on the inside and believe in yourself and believe in your team, all the things you’re doing. That’s what Alan and Chase fall back on.”
On the eve of Sunday’s race, Elliott had described the team’s season to date as “super up and down,” though he entered Martinsville a respectable fifth in the Cup Series standings — tops among the Hendrick brigade. That mark, however, came against the backdrop of Reddick’s early runaway, both in points and wins.
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Hendrick Motorsports president Jeff Andrews admitted part of the struggle so far was in adapting to a new Chevrolet body, with tweaks to the durable Camaro’s aerodynamics that made their debut this season. Andrews said the adjustment period continues with “still a lot of work left to do,” but that Sunday’s showing delivered on some of the team’s promise.
“We’ve been locking arms,” Andrews said from Victory Lane. “Could not be more proud of the determination, the fight and the grit in Hendrick Motorsports. It’s what we do. This is where we belong, and this won’t be the last one this year.”
It also may not be the last for Elliott, who has scratched the win column in eight of the last nine years, but prevailed Sunday at the earliest point of the season in his Cup Series career. Those alarm bells now sound like the chimes of yet another grandfather clock.
“I mean, we feel like we’ve been close here for a long time, and I feel like if you keep kicking on the door long enough, it’s going to come down,” No. 9 jackman T.J. Semke told NASCAR.com, right after dousing himself with a water bottle to clear the champagne from his eyes. “Obviously, Alan made an awesome call. I felt like we executed on pit road, Chase laid it all out there, put it together, and when you do have days like that where everything’s clicking, sometimes you end up in Victory Lane.”