Let’s face it: the Daytona 500 doesn’t often behave like a movie. There’s rarely a neat ending where the crowd cheers as the good guy hoists the Harley J. Earl trophy. But Sunday, for a fleeting, heart-stopping moment, it almost did. Chase Elliott, NASCAR’s Most Popular driver who has somehow never won a Crown Jewel race, emerged from the chaos with the lead, a lap to go, as if the scriptwriters finally remembered to write him a happy ending.
And then reality struck. Hard. Coming to the line, Elliott was sent spinning, tires screaming, body of the car pointed backwards, crossing the finish in fourth. Just like that, the Hollywood ending evaporated into Daytona dust.
“Yeah, I’m not really sure what happened with the first wreck,” Elliott said afterward, a calm mask over the chaos. “That’s a little further around. But we ended up kind of getting gifted the lead, and the 38 and I had got out by ourselves down the back. He had given me a good shove off into 3 and then it was kind of just he and I, and at that point I just felt momentum shift, like there was going to be another run coming behind us there at some point.”
And of course, that “another run” did come, and suddenly Elliott was on the defensive. “Man, that’s a really, really tough place to be, truthfully,” he admitted. “Obviously looking back, you can run it through your mind 1,000 times, do you do something different — I feel like if I had thrown a double block on the 45, probably would have just crashed us at that point in time. I felt like you had to pick your battles.”
It’s that delicate calculus that separates Daytona from every other race on the calendar. One moment you’re in command, the next, you’re praying to survive. “I thought maybe if somebody would pick me up on the top, you might have one more run to the line, but unfortunately ended up getting turned around,” Elliott said, shrugging at the randomness of fate in a 200-mile-an-hour circus.
Still, the disappointment couldn’t overshadow the performance. Elliott and Hendrick Motorsports showed their hand brilliantly all week. “Appreciate all the effort, everybody at Hendrick Motorsports, NAPA, Chevrolet, thought we had a good Speedweeks down here. Obviously hate to — this really sucks to be that close and come off Turn 4 with the lead and not finish it off. But that’s part of this event, and unfortunately we were on the bad end of it today.”
Daytona is cruel, capricious, and relentless. It doesn’t hand out trophies for effort, for style, or for being popular. It only rewards survival, timing, and a bit of luck. Chase Elliott came closer than anyone could have predicted. And though the story didn’t end with him lifting the trophy, for a moment, just a single heart-pounding moment, it felt like it might.
Greg was a writer for DriveTribe supporting Amazon's The Grand Tour 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, and a Masters degree in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek and a regular contributor to Forbes.
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