FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — Chase Elliott never before had won two Cup races this early in a NASCAR season.
After first winning at Martinsville at the end of March, the most popular driver in the series opened May in Victory Lane at Texas. That 1 1/2-mile track is growing on Elliott after he had not been much of a fan of the repave and reconfiguration done there nine years ago.
“I think having a win early at Martinsville ... I said it to you guys then and there, it’s not like, oh, hey, the pressure is off, we have a win,” he said Sunday at Texas after another 1-2 finish ahead of Denny Hamlin. “It’s man, we have a lot longer period of time to build on that. That’s genuinely where my mind was at.”
And still is after already getting another victory.
Elliott has the two wins and five other top-10 finishes this year, and Alex Bowman has consecutive third-place finishes for Hendrick Motorsports after missing four races because of vertigo. And it was Bowman who provided the decisive push for his teammate on the final restart with four laps left Sunday.
When crew chief Alan Gustafson came on the radio at the end of the race proclaiming Elliott a two-time Texas winner, the driver’s initial feeling was, “I’ll be damned. I’d have never thought.”
Now 30 years old and 11 races into his 12th Cup season, Elliott joined five-time winner Tyler Reddick as the only drivers with multiple wins this year. The soonest before that Elliott had two wins in a season was 17 races into 2022, when he went on to match the career-high five wins he had during his 2020 championship season.
“I knew it right at Martinsville, we’ve never won a race this early, much less to now have two this early,” Elliott said. “I’m proud of our team for that, because anytime you can check off new boxes in this sport when you’ve been doing it for 10-plus years is cool, and it’s hard to do. ”
Elliott led a race-high 87 of the 267 laps at Texas for his 23rd career victory. That came two years after ending a 42-race winless streak in the No. 9 Chevrolet with an overtime victory there.
“The 9 just performed flawlessly,” said four-time Cup champion Jeff Gordon, now vice chairman of the Hendrick team.
“One of our strongest races that we’ve had in quite some time,” Elliott said.
Elliott moved up a spot to third in the season standings, only eight points behind Hamlin but still trailing Reddick by 117. The other two Hendrick drivers, Kyle Larson (eighth) and William Byron (10th), are in the top 10 while Bowman is stuck in 34th after the four missed races.
On the final restart Sunday, Elliott had control and chose to start on the inside of Hamlin. Bowman was behind his teammate, and gave him the push of momentum onto the backstretch to clear for the lead he kept to the checkered flag.
That winning move came through Turns 1 and 2, the part of the track where the banking was reduced and racing surface widened during the repave in 2017. Turns 3 and 4 were left in their original form, making the ends of the track different for the first time since Texas Motor Speedway opened in 1997. Elliott is far from the only driver to express his displeasure about those changes.
“Yeah, you know, I’ve trashed this place for years, and I didn’t like what they did to the racetrack in reconfiguring Turns 1 and 2. ... I thought it was a really strong track (for me), and then it turned into not a strong track at all,” Elliott said. “Those things combined I think just put a bad taste in my mouth.”
Two wins in three trips to TMS certainly have eased that feeling for Elliott.
“When you run better, it grows on you little by little,” he said. “For as hard of a time as I’ve given (the track), for some reason it likes me. It loved me back. I didn’t like it, but it liked me. So I’m learning to come around a little bit.”
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AP auto racing: https://apnews.com/hub/auto-racing
Stephen Hawkins, The Associated Press
