Chase Elliott's First NASCAR Cup Win Could Not Come Fast Enough

• It took 99 races before Chase Elliott scored his first career NASCAR Cup victory on Aug. 5, 2018, at Watkins Glen International.

• Elliott led 52 laps, including the final 34, and finished a startling seven seconds in front of second-place Martin Truex Jr. that day.

• Chase Elliott won the Xfinity Series championship in 2014, becoming, at 18, the youngest driver to win a major NASCAR title.

Chase Elliott could count the close calls as they stacked up in the early years of his NASCAR Cup career.

And, if he wasn’t counting, other people were.

In 2016, his first full season at stock car racing’s top level, he had two second-place finishes and 10 top fives with no victories. The following season he boosted both numbers—five seconds and a dozen top fives, but, again, no wins.

The 2018 season dawned with the full expectation that it would be the year that Elliott and his top-flight Hendrick Motorsports team jumped the last hurdle. It took 22 races—and yet another close-call second place, but Elliott scored Aug. 5 at Watkins Glen International.

When the win finally arrived, it almost seemed easy (if Cup wins are ever easy). Elliott led 52 laps, including the final 34, and finished a startling seven seconds in front of second-place Martin Truex Jr. In a series in which road-course races often have turned into every-man-for-himself, last-lap calamities, Elliott was on cruise control.

In Dawsonville, Ga., the siren at the Dawsonville Pool Room—the loud and lasting herald of an Elliott family victory—sounded, and the success envisioned by many for Chase Elliott turned from promise to reality.

Two more wins followed that season, and Elliott won five times in 2020 on the way to his first Cup championship. For a driver from whom much was expected, the future had arrived.

The Watkins Glen victory, Elliott said, was both relief and joy.

“We needed to get to victory lane,” he said. “The thing that kept me going and kept me driven was that every time we did our best at practice and qualifying and executing the race, we had a shot to win. It was just about extracting that more often.

“That’s always a challenge, but I had had enough close calls to where I thought we had everything to be successful. We just had to put it together and be solid. It was a good day to check the box.”

Elliott has become one of racing’s best road-course drivers, but before the big splash at Watkins Glen he admitted that the oh-so-close finishes across the landscape of the Cup tour were beginning to wear on him.

“Certainly, there were enough close calls before that race to hurt your confidence a little bit,” he said. “But I felt like we were good up there that weekend, although I didn’t feel like we were as good as it turned out. Sometimes you don’t really know where you stand until the race starts. It takes a while to figure it out.”

As the son of former Cup champion Bill Elliott, Chase arrived in the sport carrying big expectations. He raced his first full season in the second-level Xfinity Series in 2014 and almost immediately announced his intentions to stir the pot. In the April race at tough old Darlington Raceway, Elliott, 18, charged to the front on the final lap, passing five cars over the final top laps, and won, leaving much more experienced drivers Matt Kenseth, Kyle Busch, Joey Logano and Kevin Harvick in his wake.

That dramatic win was a wakeup call for anyone who thought Elliott might have been rushed into the Xfinity Series too early. He also had won the previous race at Texas Motor Speedway, but to score on the last lap at treacherous Darlington, a track whose characteristics don’t lend themselves to last-lap heroics, lifted the drama to another level. It was the kind of win that drew broad attention in the NASCAR garage area, and it impressed even his father, who scored 44 Cup wins, including five at Darlington.

“I look at him winning at Texas, and that was unbelievable,” Bill said. “But then you look at Darlington, and I was just amazed, shaking my head, at how he went about it. You go out sixth with two laps to go at Darlington, and you don’t have a very good chance to win the race. And he did it. You have to keep in mind that he had never been to Texas, never been to Darlington, never run a lap at those places.”

But Wait … There’s More

• Chase Elliott’s name is actually William Clyde Elliott II. He was named for his father, Bill, who rarely is called either William or Clyde. So why Chase? Mary Colwell, a friend of Bill and Cindy Elliott (Chase’s mother), was at the hospital when he was born. “She was holding him and looked down at him and said, ‘Well, I’m sorry, he doesn’t look like a William to me. I think I’ll call him Chase,’ ” Cindy said. And “Chase” it continues to be, from firesuits to autographs.

• Chase Elliott won the Xfinity Series championship in 2014, becoming, at 18, the youngest driver to win a major NASCAR title. He won at Texas, Darlington and Chicago and breezed to the championship.

• As a teenager, Elliott worked as a dishwasher, earning $7.35 an hour, at the Dawsonville Pool Room, headquarters for Elliott family racing lore in their north Georgia hometown of Dawsonville.

• Chase and Bill, son and father, raced against each other in 2013 in a Late Model race on an Alabama short track. Chase won the race; his dad finished fourth. “I followed him around for a while,” Bill said. “When he decided to go, he was gone. I never saw him again.”