Chase Elliott and the No. 9 Hendrick Motorsports team find themselves on quite a roll as they head into the driver’s home track, EchoPark Speedway (formerly Atlanta Motor Speedway), this weekend for the Quaker State 400 presented by Walmart.
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Over the last two weekends, Elliott has snagged top-five results at two very different styles of race tracks. The 29-year-old captured a third-place result at the 2.42-mile Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez road course in Mexico City two weeks ago, and he followed that podium finish up with another solid fifth-place finish last weekend at the 2.5-mile triangular Pocono Raceway.
The two-race stretch marks the first back-to-back top-five finishes of the year for the 2020 NASCAR Cup Series champion, who has been among the most consistent drivers in the garage this season.
While he hasn’t won yet, the calling card of Elliott’s season, to date, has been the ability not to let races spiral out of control.
On his best days, Elliott has come home inside the top five. In all but one race, Elliott has notched at least a top-15 finish, and the driver’s worst finish of the entire season was a 20th-place result, which ironically came at EchoPark Speedway in February.
The driver, who still resides in Dawsonville, GA, while the majority of the NASCAR Cup Series field lives in the Charlotte, NC area, will attempt to avenge that 20th-place finish at the 1.54-mile drafting track in February as he looks to extend his season-best performance of two consecutive top-five finishes this weekend.
And when you crunch the numbers, since EchoPark Speedway was reconfigured into a superspeedway-style drafting track in 2022, you’ll notice Elliott has been very effective at the facility. Not only does Elliott have a win on the new Atlanta, which he achieved in Summer 2022, but he has no finishes outside of the top-20, which is incredible at any superspeedway track where treacherous multi-car crashes can ensnarl even the most talented drivers.
Elliott’s average finish at the new Atlanta is 10.5, which places him behind only Ryan Blaney (average finish of 6.7) since the reconfiguration of the track. Elliott has also led 125 laps, which is the fourth most of any driver (behind only Joey Logano, Austin Cindric, and William Byron) since the reconfiguration in 2022, and that’s even with Elliott missing the Spring 2023 event at the track as he was recovering from a broken leg.
Obviously, anything can, and usually does happen at superspeedway races, but Elliott is carrying a lot of momentum into this weekend; he and his team have to be gaining confidence, and they come into a track where they have performed really well. There’s a very real chance that the driver can cash in on his recent wave of momentum to take his first win of the 2025 season. So long as he can avoid the inevitable carnage that comes with superspeedway racing.
