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- Chase Elliott’s last NASCAR Cup Series win was more than a year ago at Texas Motor Speedway.
- Elliott is currently on a 37-race winless streak in the Cup Series, but has several top-five finishes this season.
Momentum is big in NASCAR Cup Series racing, but Chase Elliott doesn’t believe any momentum can be picked up from a race that took place more than a year ago.
That’s why the seven-time NASCAR Cup most popular driver doesn’t expect to have an edge on May 4 at Texas Motor Speedway (2:30 p.m. CT, FS1), the site of his last win.
“The good news was (Texas) went well,” he said. “The bad news is it was 12 months ago.”
In fact, it was more than 12 months ago, on April 14, 2024, but who’s counting? Elliott’s fans are counting because it was his last Cup Series points victory. He won on Feb. 2 at The Clash at Bowman Gray, but no points are awarded in the first race of the season, and that won’t help him in the playoff push.
“Obviously, we’d have loved to have more points wins,” Elliott said. “Certainly The Clash was a great weekend for us. While it wasn’t a points win, and I’m very much aware of that, it wasn’t like nobody was trying.”
Elliott won 18 Cup races from 2018 to 2022. Texas, however, is his only win in the past 2½ seasons.
The Dawsonville, Georgia, native is currently riding a 37-race winless streak. That’s the eighth-longest among all Cup drivers. He has not recorded a stage win in 2025.
There are two positives, however, working in his favor. While Elliott hasn’t made it back to victory lane, he has been close. And he has historically run well during a stretch of the season that is coming up.
Before finishing fifth last week at Talladega, Elliott was fourth at Martinsville and the Circuit of Americas. He has three other top-10 finishes and hasn’t been out of the top-20 since finishing 33rd in October 2024 at Las Vegas. He’s currently fourth in the NASCAR points standings and the only driver in the top 5 without a win.
Still, close hasn’t been good enough for Elliott. Especially considering he believes the setup for his Hendricks Motorsports Chevrolet is as solid as it was earlier in his career, when he was one of NASCAR’s most consistent winners.
“I’m no different than anyone else on our team, we want more and I think we’re capable of more,” he said. “We are proud of those good runs that we’ve had but we know that there’s more in the tank and that we can extract more out of our team. We’ve had some opportunities to (win) this year, but certainly not the amount of opportunities that we need or that we should have.”
After Texas, where Elliott extended a long line of success for Hendrick Motorsports on the 1.5-mile track in 2024, is Kansas, where he was third last year, has been in the top-10 the past four races and won in 2018.
After that, there’s the All-Star race at North Wilkesboro, which Elliott won in 2020 at Bristol; then Charlotte, where he also won in 2020; and Nashville, where he won in 2022.
It’s a sweet spot in the schedule Elliott admits he looks forward to.
“The season is still very early and I’ve seen enough high spots to give me hope in the direction we’ve gone in thus far,” he said. “Kansas has been a good track in most trips. We’ve had some good runs there for sure. It just suits us, or suits me historically. The environment (at North Wilkesboro) has been great the last couple of years. It’s exciting and fulfilling to win an All-Star race anywhere and fortunately I’ve had that experience once and I look forward to that stretch coming up.”
Reach Mike Organ at 615-259-8021 or on X @MikeOrganWriter.
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