SPEEDWAY, Ind. — Chase Elliott has seen the magnitude of the Brickyard 400 firsthand.
As a kid watching his dad racing the No. 9 car around the iconic Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the aura of the 2.5-mile behemoth was obvious.
Seeing his father Bill Elliott win the Brickyard 400 in 2002 solidified one thing on 6-year-old Chase Elliott’s mind: He wanted to win it too.
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That goal remains the same 23 years later, as the younger Elliott chases his first Brickyard triumph in his eighth start on the Indianapolis oval (2 p.m. ET, TNT Sports/truTV, HBO Max, IMS Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) and his fifth driving the No. 9 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet.
“There’s very few, if any, races that mean more to me than this one,” Elliott said Friday. “We want this one really bad.”
The 2020 NASCAR Cup Series champion returns to the famed “Yard of Bricks” as the series points leader for the first time this season. A winner at his home track of EchoPark Speedway (formerly Atlanta Motor Speedway) in Hampton, Georgia, in June, Elliott is setting his sights on another title pursuit. What comes first, however, is the hunt for his second Regular Season Championship.
Momentum is in favor of the No. 9 team’s hands. Elliott led a season-best 238 laps last weekend at Dover Motor Speedway before ultimately finishing sixth for his fifth top 10 in the last six races. He hasn’t finished worse than 20th all year, breaking a personal record he originally set last year.
“I think being the points leader is a product of a lot of different pieces of the puzzle that go beyond just us,” Elliott said. “But certainly from my perspective, I take pride in our team’s efforts over the course of the last four months and the things that we’ve accomplished. I don’t need a sheet of paper that adds up the points to know that we’ve been doing a good job.”
Elliott holds a 16-point advantage over Hendrick Motorsports teammate William Byron and a 38-point gap over another teammate, Kyle Larson, who won the Brickyard 400 in 2024. Denny Hamlin — who Friday announced a multiyear extension with Joe Gibbs Racing — sits fourth, 39 points behind Elliott. Elliott won the 2022 regular-season title, claiming the bonus of 15 playoff points with it. Every one of those points matters as playoff points carry with a driver through the course of the postseason.
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“Especially only having one win, the extra points would be extremely valuable for us,” Elliott said. “And we would love to get another win or two before the end of the regular season too. It’s not just that we’re happy with one. We want to get the regular season deal, but yeah, we want it all, like everybody does.”
Elliott knows the struggles of trying to go through the playoffs without the added benefit of those playoff points.
“I’ve been on both sides of the coin there,” he said. “(There have) been years where I feel like we’ve not had many playoff points, and we’ve had a couple years where we had a bunch, and I promise, it is a lot easier when you have a lot in the bank. That’s a much, much better way to go about it. The way the system is, so many things kind of being out of your control, it’s nice to have something to fall back on.”
The sting of a win that slipped away at Dover lingered slightly for Elliott, the 2022 winner at the “Monster Mile,” but he opted to look at the positives instead after a late pit stop for two tires ultimately didn’t play in their favor as Hamlin fended off the field on old tires to score his series-best fourth win of the year.
“When you have all the answers to the test after it’s over, it’s really easy to sit back and look at what was the right thing to do and what wasn’t,” Elliott said. “I thought that Denny did a really good job holding off the tires behind. Does he stay out if we stay out as well, knowing that tires (were) going to line up right behind us on the second row, and he didn’t have control of the restart? I don’t think they do, but maybe they do. Regardless, it’s a tough spot to be in, and it went the way it went. We can’t change it, but we can certainly take some lessons from the day and from the weekend and try to apply that forward to put ourselves in positions like that more often.”
What’s next is Indidanapolis, where Elliott will have another chance to kiss the bricks if he can break through for his first Brickyard 400 triumph.
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