Indeed, even a beginning close the rear of the pack couldn’t keep Chase Elliott from proceeding with his uncanny success on road courses.
Elliott began in the 34th position yet found a way to win the NASCAR Cup Series at Road America on Sunday to wrap up a playoff spot. The 25-year-old Hendrick Motorsports has seven profession Cup Series triumphs on road courses, placing him in sole possession of third spot in NASCAR history.
“I really have no idea,” Elliott said about his success on road courses. “I feel like it’s just good cars. Our team as a whole has been good at road courses the whole time too, Kyle (Larson) won at Sonoma. I feel like drivers are only as good as what they have to drive. Fortunately I feel like I’ve got the best stuff and just got to make it work.”
Elliott began so far back on the grounds a cautions hampered his qualifying attempts on Sunday morning.
It ended up not mattering as Elliott won by 5.705 seconds over Christopher Bell. Busch was third, trailed by Kurt Busch and points leader Denny Hamlin.
Kyle Busch took a concise lead on a restart on the 46th of 62 laps, however Elliott got up to speed to him at Turn 11 and had passed him by Turn 12. The restart followed an alert that came when Anthony Alfredo turned off base.
Elliott remained in front the remainder of the way. His lone difficulty came as he was celebrating his victory.
After he’s as of now done one celebratory burnout on the front stretch, Elliott heard fans requesting that he do another Elliott said thereafter that “I don’t know if I ever felt that much peer pressure in my life to do a burnout.”
So Elliott did a second burnout and destroyed his tires simultaneously.
“All these people were chanting ‘Burnout!’ at me,” Elliott said. “I wasn’t going to say no. So I did. I blew the back tires off of it, then ran out of gas and had to have a push.”
Elliott, the 2020 series champion, gave Hendrick Motorsports its seventh victory in its last eight Cup races. Hendrick had its six-race series of wins snapped last end of the week when Kyle Busch succeeded at Pocono for Joe Gibbs Racing.
Hendrick drivers have won 10 of the 20 Cup Series races so far this year.
Elliott needs just two more road-course victories to get Jeff Gordon, who has the record with nine. Tony Stewart won eight Cup Series occasions on street courses.
He as of now is the primary individual at any point to dominate Cup Series races on five diverse street courses: Watkins Glen, Charlotte, Circuit of the Americas, Daytona and Road America.
“I think he’s a very intelligent race-car driver,” said Elliott’s crew chief, Alan Gustafson. “I think that’s what puts him in a really good position at road courses, where there’s a lot to process and a lot that goes on. It takes him a bit of time to kind of get that all together and figured out, and then when he does, it’s not just a feel. He knows what he’s doing. There’s a lot of thought and process behind what he does, so it’s very repeatable.”
NASCAR had three street seminars on its Cup Series schedule from 2018 to 2020, and never had more than two at whatever year prior to that. The current year’s schedule features seven races on street courses.
This race likewise offered good news for Bell, who had his first top-five completion since setting fourth at Richmond in April.
“It’s been a trying last two months, but we feel like we’re getting back on track here,” Bell said. “There’s no reason why we can’t be running up front every week.”
This denoted the first run through NASCAR has carried its premier series to Road America since Tim Flock won a blustery Grand National race in 1956, and the hotly anticipated return pulled in more than 100,000 spectators for the whole four-day event.
Those fans braved Fourth of July temperatures that arrived at the 90s.
“This is a massive road course, and there were people everywhere around the course,” Elliott said. “It’s exciting, man. When we change the schedule up and go to new places, you bring energy and excitement that our series deserves to have. I think we saw that today.”
Street America, which opened in 1955, is situated on 640 sections of land somewhere between Milwaukee and Green Bay. The 4.084-mile course includes 14 turns and is encircled by around 1,600 camping areas.
The course wasn’t new to the whole field since Road America has facilitated a yearly Xfinity Series occasion since 2010. Kyle Busch won Saturday’s Xfinity Series occasion at Road America, giving the Joe Gibbs Racing driver four Xfinity wins this year in as numerous beginnings.