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JOLIET, Ill. — With the laps winding down and Chase Elliott out front, NASCAR’s opening race of the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup appeared to be headed to a surprising start.
Was Elliott, the son of a former champion and the future of Hendrick Motorsports thinking about victory? About win No. 1 in NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Series and a sure-fire ticket into the next round of eliminations, perhaps?
No way.
Instead, as he leaned against his No. 24 Chevrolet afterward, a soft drink upside down in his hand and its contents leaking slowly onto pit road, he said he was thinking “that a caution was probably going to come out.”
It did.
And in the scramble on and off pit road, mixed in with the calls by some to stay out and risk worn tires versus fresh ones, Elliott, 20, emerged fifth instead of first.
With only two laps — three miles — to try and get back into the lead.
He didn’t.
“That’s a fact of life,” said Elliott, who finished third, of the late caution. “I guess fortunately and unfortunately I’ve raced long enough to know that these races don’t go green for that long period of time.
“We see more late-race cautions than we do not; that’s just the world we live in. It was expected; it’s going to happen.”
Elliott led three times, his blue Chevrolet out front for 75 of the race’s 270 laps. It was not the first time victory had seemingly been stripped from his grasp.
Martin Truex Jr., Sunday’s winner of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle 400 at Chicagoland Speedway, said he knew what Elliott must be feeling. The Furniture Row Racing driver has had his share of dominating runs end in disappointment.
“First off, I want to say I feel for Chase,” Truex said. “I know what he’s going through. He did a great job. I wasn’t going to catch him. I was catching him, but I was not catching him enough to pass him in five more laps.
“So I know what he’s going through. But obviously he did a good job and they were really fast today. We had to come from behind.”
Elliott, who started 14th on the 40-car grid when rain forced officials to cancel qualifying on Friday, wasn’t out of the top 10 for long. Or the top five, for that matter, settling in for the duration after only a little more than 40 laps had been completed.
He gave notice of his car’s speed with a 57-lap stint out front (from laps 178-234), and lost the spot only during a final round of green-flag stops. By Lap 249, he was back on top and keeping a manageable advantage on the rest of the field.
But when Michael McDowell blew a tire to put the race under caution just four laps from the end of regulation, Elliott’s lead suddenly evaporated.
“They had no choice,” crew chief Alan Gustafson said of the call by NASCAR officials to display the yellow flag.
“It’s just frustrating because it’s not determined by the people who should determine the outcome of the race,” Gustafson continued. “It’s racing. It’s why this is one of the most humbling sports in the world. You can do everything right — there are some things we could have done better, that we have to clean up. But at the end of the day it’s frustrating to have it won and … whatever. It’s over.
“We didn’t execute the last pit stop and (the 78 of Truex) beat us out. We can work on that. (Our) guys did an awesome job today; I’m really proud of their pit stops. A little hiccup; obviously it came at the wrong time, but we’ll work on it.”
After the first of three Chase races that make up the Round of 16, Elliott sits sixth in points. The series moves on to New Hampshire and then Dover before the bottom four drivers are eliminated and the Round of 12 begins.
There were positives to take away from the almost-win.
“I feel like we did a good job trying to control the things that we could control today,” Elliott said. “We had a good car, something to be proud of. We can’t control when they’re (yellow flags) going to come out or who is going to stay out on tires or where you’re going to line up on restarts. That stuff is just life; (you) move on.”
