Chase Elliott on racing at Bristol: ‘Whole weekend was really weird’

Chase Elliott shared some fascinating takeaways from Bristol Motor Speedway after last weekend’s entertaining race.

The Hendrick Motorsports star joined The Dale Jr Download earlier this week, where the No. 9 wheelman explained how the tire-wear changed throughout the weekend, from the beginning of practice to the main event.

“It was just so weird like, to back up to Saturday and in practice,” Elliott harkened back. “We all went out the first laps, and then someone spun out. And the caution came out. And then came back down pit road, and then we went back out on track. Before I even got back up on the track, I was coming around the the apron there, and I like went to turn the steering wheel and I missed the whole way. Like, I’m running 30 miles per hour, and I just turn the wheel and nothing happened. Missed the apron, and I like ran up on the banking, on accident. I’m like, ‘God, that’s super weird.’ You know, ‘Do I have a flat tire right now? There’s something, there’s something wrong.’ So got back up on track and started running, and just had no front end. So I guess what I’m getting at is, the whole weekend was really weird.

“We ran throughout practice, probably ran — I don’t know, 30, 40 laps in practice, and we did have some chording issues. But that’s not super uncommon for a fresh race track, you know early in the weekend, and the Xfinity cars weren’t there either. So the trucks hadn’t been on track very long. We weren’t super caught off guard by that. Then we started the race on on Sunday, and to me, the track felt totally different. I don’t know. It was much cooler on Sunday. The sun wasn’t beating on the track quite like it was on Saturday. The track had a lot of grip, but you could just tell the tire couldn’t take it. You know, just right from the get go, it just felt like you were cheese-grating the tires.”

While Elliott relented that the situation probably was a little too extreme, he was a fan of the racing at Bristol, and hopes to see NASCAR move in a direction to give us a similar product into the future.

“Those first couple runs, I think everybody realized that you know, we were in trouble in a lot of ways,” the former NASCAR Cup Series champion added. “It was roughly — with the sets of tires we had, it was somewhere around 50 laps a set, in order for you to use all of them you know, to get yourself to the end of the race. Obviously, they came in and gave us another set of tires because that was getting kind of close, and my understanding was they only had one set give us in the trailer, so they were kind of running out options. I think that’s why you saw the cautions being so long, but for me, I had a blast.

“I thought that it was — was it too far into one direction? Probably. I mean, was it was it a little extreme? I would say so. But I just, in the past, I’ve seen things like this happen, and I’ve seen a huge overreaction, and then that is what creates some poor product for a long period of time, until we can just slowly creep back in the direction of actually having some tire wear. So it was just nice. You know, it was just — how your run went was in your hands. I mean you know, obviously you had to have the balance where you wanted to be, and as the race went on for us, we got off on balance and it made my tire were worse, and then we got our balance.”

Regardless, Chase Elliott had a good weekend at Bristol, but he could have an even better one in Austin at COTA, as NASCAR returns to a road course for the first time in 2024. We’ll see if the Hendrick Motorsports star can end his winless streak on Sunday afternoon.