Hendrick Motorsports’ Chase Elliott holds a slim three-point edge over his teammate Kyle Larson atop the NASCAR Cup Series championship with five races remaining to settle the regular season title. Reddick is only 15 points back and Hamlin is only 20 points off the pace entering Sunday’s Brickyard 400.
Asked about the close title race, Elliott reiterated Friday afternoon the importance of winning that Regular Season Championship is not so much to claim the “title” but because of the valuable 15 bonus points it rewards the driver; a bonus that is carried throughout each round of the Playoffs.
“We’re trying to win it,” Elliott said emphatically. “We’re trying to run as good as we can to accumulate as many points as possible to win the 15-points. I mean, that’s all that matters. The Regular Season Championship is really meaningless, it’s just [about] the points.”
The 2020 NASCAR Cup Series champ certainly knows first-hand how crucial that guaranteed bonus is for each Playoff round. It was an incredible help for him in 2022, even though he didn’t ultimately take the title.
“We just had a really good first half of the year and then we ran really bad those last eight-and-a-half weeks,” Elliott recalled. Without those points, we would have been long out of it, in my view. Mathematically, I’m not exactly sure where we would have been. Just going off the way we ran, we needed to be a lot better and that certainly helped to have some points to lean on because it would have been really, really tough without that. So, they can man a lot.
“You hope that you’re running good enough that you don’t need them is the goal that everyone has.”
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