Before the April 28 race at Talladega Superspeedway this year, Ford had a stranglehold on the 2.66-mile track, having won the seven previous races there.
But Chevrolet adopted a team strategy for the spring race and swept the podium, with Chase Elliott winning the event, Alex Bowman running second and Ryan Preece finishing third. The team concept worked so well that Elliott is confident it will be more of the same for Sunday’s 1000Bulbs.com 500 (2 p.m. ET on NBC, MRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
“Yeah, I think it will be really similar from all fronts, and I’m sure all manufacturers will be kind of doing the same thing,” Elliott said on Friday at Talladega. “The Playoff picture is obviously important to some of the guys in each respective group, I suppose. The manufacturers are going to see it as they want the manufacturer to do well, and they see that being better than anything else.
“I think you’re going to see more of those games being played this weekend. I thought we did equally as good of a job at Daytona as we did here in the spring, we just had some things go our way here in the spring and they didn’t in Daytona. So it goes to show that even though we worked well together and that we all did a nice job, it’s not always going to work. No guarantees, for sure.”
Elliott has more on his mind at Talladega than getting a win for Chevrolet. After an early engine failure relegated him to a 38th-place finish last Sunday at Dover, Elliott is seven points below the cut line entering the second race of the Round of 12 in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs.
Greg is the author of "The Nuts and Bolts of NASCAR: The Definitive Viewers' Guide to Big-Time Stock Car Auto Racing" and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, a Masters degree in psychology and is currently a PhD candidate majoring in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek.