Chase Elliott climbed out of his No. 9 Chevrolet at Richmond Raceway on August 15 and used a phrase that would have sounded strange from him two years ago: small victories. A former Cup Series champion, the most popular driver in NASCAR for seven straight seasons, was talking about a fifth-place finish like it was a trophy.
That is what nine races without a top-10 finish will do to a driver’s vocabulary.
Elliott has spent his career being measured against a standard most drivers never have to answer for. He won the 2020 Cup Series championship at 24 years old, driving the same No. 9 Chevrolet his father Bill Elliott made famous decades earlier. He has been voted NASCAR’s Most Popular Driver for eight consecutive seasons, an honor that fills grandstands and sells merchandise but does nothing to quiet the scrutiny when results dry up. A nine-race skid from most Cup Series regulars draws a shrug. From Elliott, it becomes a referendum on whether Hendrick Motorsports made a mistake building around him.
The Longest Drought of His Career
Elliott won at Texas Motor Speedway on May 3, and for a moment it looked like the No. 9 team had found its footing. Instead, the results fell apart. Over the next twelve races, Elliott managed only one top-10 finish, a seventh at Nashville Superspeedway. Everything else landed outside the top 10, a stretch that grew into the longest such streak of his Cup Series career.
For a driver who won a championship in 2020 and built his name on Hendrick Motorsports’ famous No. 9, that kind of run means more than the points sheet shows. Hendrick expects contention. Elliott expects it of himself.
Richmond arrived with two regular season races left before the Chase field locked in, and Elliott needed a result that reset the conversation.
A Fifth Place That Felt Bigger Than It Looked
Elliott started 13th in the Cook Out 400 and spent the night working forward. He picked up stage points in Stage 1, then finished second in Stage 2 to add four more. Crew chief Alan Gustafson called for a later pit stop on Lap 363, a gamble against Christopher Bell’s one-stop strategy that paid off as Bell’s fuel mileage bet came up short late. Elliott picked off two more positions in the closing laps and crossed the line fifth, the highest-finishing Chevrolet of the night.
Speaking with reporter Dustin Long after the race, Elliott explained why an imperfect night felt like real progress.
“You just kind of have to start stacking some small victories together,” Elliott said. “I feel like to get something in the right direction, I hope that that was, you know, tonight was an indication of that course. I thought it was a really solid effort with room for improvement. I felt like I made a couple mistakes, had a couple hiccups on pit road. So to know that we can not be perfect, but to get out of here with the top five, I think is really encouraging.”
The finish did more than end a slump. It clinched Elliott’s spot in the 2026 Chase, locking him into the 16-driver playoff field with points to spare and moving him up to sixth in the standings.
A Rough Summer for the Whole Organization
Elliott’s drought was not an isolated problem. Hendrick Motorsports, the most decorated organization in NASCAR history, had spent the summer searching for the pace that defined its spring. Richmond offered the clearest sign yet that the fix was working. For the first time in a Cup Series race in 2026, all four Hendrick Chevrolets finished inside the top 10 in the same event. Elliott led the way in fifth, Kyle Larson followed in sixth, William Byron ran ninth, and Alex Bowman rounded out the group in 10th.
Larson’s own results had been a story of their own for much of the summer, with a run of races at Hendrick that failed to match his talent. Seeing all four cars finish together said something about the organization resetting as a group rather than one driver carrying the load.
Byron’s top-10 kept him comfortably above the playoff cutline, though he slipped a spot overall in the standings shuffle. For a team accustomed to entering the Chase as the favorite, spending August searching for answers instead of laps led was an uncomfortable position. Richmond did not erase the previous three months, but it gave every driver in the shop a result to point to heading into the postseason.
Pressure That Never Really Lifts
Elliott has been candid before about what it means to drive for Rick Hendrick, an owner who calls the day after a big result and expects the trend to continue. After a win at Martinsville earlier this year, Elliott said the pressure on his team did not disappear the moment they reached Victory Lane, and his crew chief admitted that a congratulatory call from ownership gets your attention fast. That relationship cuts both ways. A five-time series champion team does not get to celebrate quietly, and it does not get to slump quietly either. Every race Elliott finished outside the top 10 this summer became a storyline about whether the sport’s most popular driver had lost his edge.
Richmond did not answer every question. Elliott himself pointed out the mistakes, the pit road hiccups, the imperfections that kept the night from being a truly dominant run. But he also had it right: the No. 9 team does not need perfection right now. It needs a direction, and for the first time in nine races, it had one.
A Standings Battle Still Taking Shape
Seven drivers have officially punched their Chase tickets following Richmond: Denny Hamlin, Ryan Blaney, Ty Gibbs, Tyler Reddick, Chase Briscoe, Elliott, and Christopher Bell. Hamlin sits comfortably atop the regular season standings with 969 points, a 115-point cushion over second-place Blaney. Elliott and Bell are tied at 695 points, locked in with room to spare heading into the final two regular season races at New Hampshire and Daytona.
NASCAR’s 2026 Chase format resets the field once the playoffs begin, with the regular season points leader starting at 2,100 and each seed below stepping down in five-point increments. That reset counts for a lot for a driver like Elliott. Once the Chase opens, his rough summer stops counting against him in the way regular season points do now. What carries over instead is momentum, and a team’s belief that it has found the setup direction it spent months chasing.
What Comes Next
The Chase begins in three weeks, and Elliott enters it with fresh momentum instead of a slump trailing behind him. Hendrick Motorsports will carry four cars into the playoffs, each with something to prove after a summer that tested the organization’s identity as NASCAR’s benchmark team. For Elliott personally, the calculus is simple. He has run this deep into a season on talent alone before. What Richmond showed was a team starting to execute again under pressure, stacking small results into something that might hold up over a 10-race playoff grind.
Nine races without a top 10 is the kind of number that gets brought up in every interview until a driver answers it. Elliott finally has an answer, even if it is a modest one. Stack enough small victories together, and eventually they start to look like the version of the No. 9 team everyone expected to show up in the first place.
New Hampshire and Daytona will offer two more chances to build on Richmond before the format resets and every driver in the field starts fresh. For Hendrick Motorsports, the bigger question stretches beyond Elliott alone. A four-car sweep of the top 10 does not happen by accident, and if the organization carries that pace into the Chase, the summer that nearly buried its most popular driver could end up as the turning point that saved its season instead.
