Chase Elliott's latest victory reminds us that distance does not equal disinterest

New York Times

20 hours ago

As Chase Elliott basked in the adulation of the crowd at his hometown track on Saturday night, he made a mental note to open his mind and absorb as much of it as he possibly could.
It was one of the moments where 'you just wish you could bottle it up, get it out every now and again, and relive it,' Elliott said. It was a full sensory experience Elliott said he'll 'remember for the rest of my life.'
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'I'm not sure anything has ever matched that,' he said a couple hours later after the cheers had died down. 'It was crazy. I've never been on stage and been a singer or anything, (but) I would have to imagine it would feel something like that.'
Does that sound like a guy who doesn't care about his job? A dude who is checked out? Of course not. It's just that when it comes to Elliott, the work/life balance he carries often gets mistaken for disinterest — and when he's not winning, it becomes an increasingly glaring focus among the fan base.
He's not committed! Does he even want to do this?
That's partly because of what Elliott allows us to see — which admittedly isn't much. But just because it gets repeated so often doesn't make it true.
The misunderstanding probably starts with where he chooses to live. Unlike 95 percent of NASCAR drivers, Elliott does not live in North Carolina. He resides in his hometown of Dawsonville, Ga., and is not immersed in the Charlotte area's racing bubble.
Like Carl Edwards did while living in Missouri or like Martin Truex Jr. did in the latter years of his career while splitting time between New Jersey and Florida, Elliott's living situation allows him to disconnect from NASCAR during the week as much as he can without taking away from his competitive efforts.
Though he has social media accounts, Elliott does not post on them himself — or seemingly even scroll through his timeline. Whatever doesn't help make his car go faster is something he's not interested in — and that includes keeping up on the latest NASCAR news.
It creates eyebrow-raising situations like last week at Pocono, when Elliott said he didn't know anything about the in-season tournament and was surprised to learn there was a $1 million prize for the winner. NASCAR fans, who consume every morsel of news and insight about their favorite sport, have a hard time reconciling how they can know so much more about what's going on in racing than NASCAR's most popular driver does.
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So whenever he goes through a drought, Elliott's aloof approach to NASCAR-related topics creates an easy target for his critics. It probably doesn't help that he is open about it, too.
Last year, for example, Elliott told The Athletic he consumes 'literally as little as I can' when it comes to NASCAR news. But when you listen to the rest of what he says and read between the lines, it's more layered than it appears.
'I really just don't find it to be helpful,' he said of being immersed in the NASCAR minutiae. 'I don't see where reading into a lot of those things is productive, even in the slightest. So I've really tried to just shift my priorities and the things I view that matter to me. Scrolling through the internet on things that just simply don't make a difference, I have just chosen to eliminate, and I feel like I'm a better competitor for it.'
A GEORGIA BOY AND HIS PEOPLE! 💚@chaseelliott | #QS400 pic.twitter.com/2LJfURv9lt
— EchoPark Speedway (@EchoParkSpdwy) June 29, 2025
Though Elliott is still only 29, he has always been exceptionally mature and worldly. At some point in his mid-20s, he realized he was saying 'yes' to too many commitments and spreading himself too thin. In his mind, those are the things that hurt competitiveness — not being ignorant about the magnitude of another driver's penalty that doesn't affect him personally.
'When I decided I wanted to be a race car driver, I didn't decide to pursue that because I wanted to be on TV or get a bunch of attention,' he said during his conversation with The Athletic last year. 'That was just never a thought in my mind. It was all about, 'Man, these guys are great race car drivers. That would be so cool to do.'
'I really admired and respected whoever's craft I was watching. I love the amount of discipline it takes to be at the top of this garage. That is the most important thing in my view. … Competitive on-track performance is the whole reason I wanted to do this and what keeps me coming back each week. So I'm going to make sure I prioritize what matters.'
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Again, nothing there sounds like someone who doesn't care. Rather, it's a high-profile person in the spotlight trying to care about the right things. That requires Elliott enforcing boundaries other drivers may not have, but it doesn't make it wrong just because it's different.
Let's take a step back for a moment and look at Elliott as a whole. On Saturday, Elliott became just the seventh driver in NASCAR history to reach 20 wins before his 30th birthday. The others on the list are among the sport's legendary names: Richard Petty, Jeff Gordon, Kyle Busch, Joey Logano, Junior Johnson and Fireball Roberts.
If his career ended tomorrow, Elliott would already have done enough to be in the NASCAR Hall of Fame (yes, really — and it's not even close). He has a Cup championship and Xfinity championship to go with those 20 Cup wins and also has seven Most Popular Driver Awards. Elliott has won his 20 Cup races on every major category of track: Road course (seven, which is third all time), intermediate (five), superspeedway (four), 1-mile (three) and short track (one).
The problem is he hasn't won enough lately. And it's still a bit of a mystery where the turning point occurred.
Was it when Kyle Larson joined Hendrick Motorsports? Since then, Larson has won 26 Cup races — double the next-closest driver in the field — to Elliott's nine. And that next-closest driver to Larson is another Hendrick teammate, William Byron.
But that's not really valid, since Elliott made the Championship 4 in his first two years as Larson's teammate and even led the series in victories in 2022 (five).
The more notable shift seemed to be the Next Gen car. Though Elliott won more races than anyone in 2022, the first year of the Next Gen, that was an unusual season where no one quite had a handle on it yet. Once teams began developing it further and the field became closer, Elliott struggled to find the elite speed he needed to win races.
His snowboarding accident early in 2023 also caused him to miss valuable seat time during that pivotal second season of the Next Gen. Elliott never won that year after he returned from the accident and missed the playoffs for the only time in his career.
Since then, he's only won two races — at Texas last year, which snapped a 42-race winless streak, and on Saturday night at Atlanta, which snapped a 44-race winless streak.
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Earlier this year, in an interview with Fox Sports analyst Kevin Harvick, Kyle Busch recounted a conversation with Elliott in which the two drivers compared notes on their struggles with the Next Gen car.
'I've had some long conversations with Chase Elliott because we grew up the same way (racing Late Models),' Busch said. 'I'm like, 'Man, have you found this thing to just be a beast? Like a challenge?' He's like, 'Yeah, I've had to change my driving style.''
But that's not to say the car has taken all of Elliott's speed; he's still fast, just not fast enough to run up front as often. This year, for example, Elliott hasn't finished worse than 20th. He's only been outside the top 15 three times. And he is on pace for his career-best average finish: 10.3, which leads the Cup Series by almost two full positions.
He recently told The Athletic that the consistent finishes, even on the 'bad' days, can be harder than winning races, in some instances. And despite the victories, the ability to salvage good results each week has only made the confidence in his team grow.
'It's just a really good reminder that we have a really good team,' he said earlier this month. 'I really do believe that.'
Now Elliott could use more nights like Saturday to make sure everyone else believes it, too.
(Top photo of Chase Elliott celebrating Saturday's win: Sean Gardner / Getty Images)