NASCAR: Chase Elliott May Struggle in 2016

Highly regarded around the NASCAR field at such a young age is a guy named Chase Elliott.

He is the son of the 1988 Sprint Cup Champion Bill Elliott and has provided some quality finishes and flashes of brilliance behind the wheel in his short racing career. His 2014 rookie season in the NASCAR Xfinity series yielded three wins, 16 top five’s and 26 top-10’s to go along with two poles which skyrocketed him to his first championship as a NASCAR driver. Unfortunately, he did not capture that same 2014 success in 2015 as he only recorded one win, 11 top five’s and 27 top-10’s which led to him finishing behind Chris Buescher in a last-race-thrilling-points finish at the end of the 2015 season.

Turning the chapter in Chase Elliott’s career book, we now get to see his rise to Sprint Cup. Unfortunately, this rise reminds me of a young Joey Logano who was considered the next Jeff Gordon in the early portion of his career as well.

Everyone knows how much pressure was placed on Logano as he was tabbed to fill the seat for Tony Stewart who decided to make his own team. Logano never finished higher than 15^th in the standings during a four-season stretch and only scored two wins, one due to a rain delay.

One has to be skeptical about Elliott coming into the famous No. 24 ride. Fans have to face it, the kids got a ton of spotlight on him and that rarely turns out to be good. I have to compare Elliott to Casey Atwood which is not as harsh as I could have gone.

Since he entered into NASCAR, Elliott has virtually had a serious silver throttle in his cars so to speak.

He was signed to a JR Motorsports ride and didn’t have the issues of really learning what a moderately funded team had to struggle with and how to really learn his ride. That small fact is big enough for me to predict that the learning curve for Elliott will be steep behind the wheel of a Sprint Cup car. He didn’t have to struggle with a team that needed a lot of time to work on their cars through driver feedback, which is where Elliott is most likely to ultimately struggle.

Face it, people, Elliott is not going to pick up any wins in his rookie season and he won’t be the driver he was in the Xfinity series. Elliott will not be a better driver until he has to fight a poor handling car and face some true adversity. Dale Earnhardt Jr. left Elliott in the Xfinity Series for another season to help him develop as a driver, but I think Elliott would have been better off if Earnhardt would have made it tougher for him to even have the speed he had through a series of developmental tests. Based on the development of Chase Elliott, I can’t foresee him being a true contender for another few years.

Again, this isn’t to say he doesn’t have a lot of talent because he does. However the Sprint Cup Series is a different animal and when you throw in his lack of dealing with adversity and the fact that he is replacing a legend; it’s simply not a recipe for immediate success.

If you think that Chase Elliott will capture that Xfinity magic or if you don’t agree with anything said, you can always let us know by commenting below. You can also reach out to us via our various social media platforms.

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