Alan Gustafson hits back against media criticism of Chase Elliott: ‘What am I missing?’

For the first time since October 2022, Chase Elliott won in the NASCAR Cup Series. Alan Gustafson took time to defend his driver. Over the last year, there was a narrative building about Elliott’s abilities in the Next Gen car.

The 2023 season was winless. Elliott had good finishes when he was healthy and in the car. But never had winning speed outside of one or two races. Gustafson has been there the whole time, a crew chief that has worked with the likes of Jeff Gordon and Mark Martin, and he wants to make something clear.

Chase Elliott has not fallen off. The results have been there. Looking at reality, the broken leg probably has more to do with the “fall off” than anything. Gustafson got a little frustrated, but in a playful way with the media when asked about that narrative.

“You’re talking about Chase like he can’t drive this car, I mean, he really can and he does really good,” Gustafson said in the postrace press conference, via Bob Pockrass of FOX Sports. “I don’t, the winless streak is, I can think of certainly one untimely caution, there was really a couple of times, you know, Charlotte I feel like it was, we had by far the best car at the Roval, right, and the caution comes out and different things happen obviously out of the car. When you’re struggling, yeah, you just kind of have to grind it out a bit more.”

Then, Gustafson laid it all out. Chase Elliott has been good. There have been issues. Every driver has a bad season every once in a while. And he had receipts to back it up.

“I guess my point is, it’s not, if you look at his body of work in this car, regular-season champion the first year of the car, five wins to the playoffs, runs two races, Daytona 500 which we all know is a crapshoot, finishes second at Fontana which is pretty good, has a snowboarding accident, breaks his leg, has maybe not as good a year as we would have liked but still I think the time he was in that car his average finish was third or fourth best of anybody on the track. Now we start this season with this car … fourth in points, one win, three top-5s, average running position before we started was fourth, what am I missing?”