Over the years, many a young racing phenom has excelled in the beginner levels of the sport only to eventually hit a performance ceiling as he’s moved up the racing ladder.
Dawsonville’s Chase Elliott is doing the opposite. After starting out as a better-than-average but not dominating driver at the beginner level of racing, Elliott has gotten better each time he moved up a division.
With his father, NASCAR champion Bill Elliott, steering his career, Elliott, 18, hasn’t spend long at any level. Before he had a license to drive on the street, he’d won some of Late Model racing’s marquee events, including the biggest of all, the Snowball Derby at Five Flags Speedway in Pensacola, Fla.
As soon as he was old enough to compete in a top-tier NASCAR division, he joined the Camping World Truck Series and got a victory at Canadian Tire Motorsports Park in just his sixth start.
This weekend, he heads to Phoenix International Raceway needing to finish just one position ahead of his JR Motorsports teammate Regan Smith to win the Nationwide Series championship and thereby become the youngest driver ever to win a major NASCAR championship as well as the first rookie to do so.
Elliott has not only been good at accumulating points this year, he’s been a winner too, scoring three victories in a series that sees most of its races won by double-dipping Sprint Cup drivers.
Through it all, he’s maintained the composure usually associated with veteran drivers. And he’s been honest and often hard on himself in assessing his own performance, as evidenced by his comments in a team release advancing Saturday’s race at Phoenix.
“In the spring we had a decent run, but due to the rain-out we never were able to get a full analysis of the weekend,” he said. “I love short-track racing, which is what Phoenix is all about, but I certainly have a lot to learn about Phoenix and how to get around there.”
If Elliott secures the series crown, which he’s likely to do even if he doesn’t clinch it a week early — he has a 48-point lead with two races to go — it will be the third NASCAR championship for his sponsor, Atlanta-based NAPA. The auto parts giant won titles in the Camping World Truck Series in 1996 and 1998 with driver Ron Hornaday, Jr.
Eliminator odds: NASCAR's number-crunchers have come up with clinch scenarios for the eight drivers in the Eliminator Round of the Chase for the Sprint Cup who are hoping to become one of the four drivers who will run for the championship next week at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
To be one of the championship participants, Joey Logano and Denny Hamlin, who are tied atop the standings heading into this weekend’s Quicken Loans Race Heroes 500 at Phoenix International Raceway, need to finish at least 11th to run for the title at Homestead. Ryan Newman, who enters Phoenix third in the standings, needs to finish at least ninth to make the finals, no matter how the other drivers finish.
The other five — Brad Keselowski, Matt Kenseth, Jeff Gordon, Carl Edwards and Kevin Harvick — need to win at Phoenix to be assured a berth at Homestead. Any of them still could get into the finale without winning at Phoenix, but another driver or drivers would have to have a poor Phoenix finish for that to happen.
Hamlin said on this week’s NASCAR teleconference that despite the cushion the scenarios seem to indicate, he and the other two at the top of the standings can’t cruise their way to a championship berth.
“I think as tense as eight drivers are going to be this weekend, cautious is going to make you finish about 17th,” he said. “So I can’t count on that. I think that I have to be aggressive. … You especially can’t be lax on restarts. The freight train stuck on the top line can’t get down. There are a lot of factors that track does not allow you to be conservative at.”
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