Chase Elliott Refuses to Concede Inferiority to Kyle Larson Despite Shocking Bristol Outcome

Hendrick Motorsports put themselves in a moment under the lights at Bristol this Saturday. All 4 drivers have booked their berths in the second round of the NASCAR Playoffs leaving Thunder Valley.

The shiniest one at night’s end, Kyle Larson, led almost 92% of all 500 scheduled laps to grab his 5th season victory. Following up to give Rick Hendrick’s team a 1-2 finish, Chase Elliott finished right behind the #5 driver. As a result, Elliott coincidentally found himself on the wrong end of a new Bristol record. For those unaware, Kyle Larson’s 7.088-second Margin of Victory is the second-largest on the racetrack since the inception of the digital scoring system in 1993. But Elliott suggests there wasn’t as much to separate himself from his sword-wielding teammate, barring maybe only the results.

Chase Elliott admits Kyle Larson’s traffic control ruled Bristol

One can classify this year’s Bristol Night Race in two ways. For Kyle Larson fans, it was total domination of the competition. For others, the event was a near-spotless spectacle of traditional high-stakes short-track racing. Memories of the unpredictable tire wear from the Bristol Spring Race back in March bore heavy over the weekend. So when Goodyear announced they would bring the same tire sets this time around, the main point of contention was: would the same thing happen again, but this time on a relatively cooler surface?

Barring the stage breaks, there were only three cautions during the race, and no notable tire issues occurred. The only real “falloff” came in the form of Playoff eliminations, with Ty Gibbs, Brad Keselowski, Martin Truex Jr, and Harrison Burton, all getting knocked out of championship contention after Bristol. On the positive side of the new cutline, Kyle Larson will head to Kansas as the top seed of the Round of 12. Trailing him will be William Byron in fourth (+14), and Chase Elliott in seventh (+6). Alex Bowman is the only Hendrick driver inside the bubble with a -7 points deficit.

However, Chase Elliott’s friendly competition was with Kyle Larson. In a video of his post-race conference uploaded to Twitter by Peter Startta, the reigning Most Popular Driver talked about where exactly he lost to Larson. Elliott explained, “I feel like my car was really good. I don’t think his car was any better than mine. I think he did a little better job than I did getting into traffic, and that was certainly the difference… “

“We were both just pacing ourselves waiting to get the lapped traffic. And I thought I had done an okay job, and he just was able to slice through there and I got hung up,” admitted the driver of the #9 Llumar Chevrolet Camaro Zl1. In his eyes, it was a “solid night,” albeit he fell only 7 seconds short of the optimal result. Answering a separate question about the lack of ‘tire issues’ under the lights at Bristol, Elliott said, “That’s been the norm here, you know? I mean the spring race was kind of an outlier. But you know, I would say this was very normal.”

What isn’t normal these days in the Next-Gen era is a seven-second MOV, that too, on the “World’s Fastest Half-Mile.” Interestingly, 5 cars finished on the lead lap at Bristol during the Spring Race. On Saturday, only six more cars managed to do that under night-time conditions. The verdict is clear. Something seems to be “slowing” the excitement down on NASCAR’s short track. Be it a lack of horsepower or a gear-shifting problem, all the stakeholders must come together to find a fix. Otherwise, near-perfect victories like Kyle Larson’s would burst their bubble of parity.

A collective win for Hendrick Motorsports

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No one has dominated at Bristol quite like the #5 driver did in almost 16 long years. Kyle Busch was the last driver to lead 400+ laps in the foreground of the Northern Tennessee mountains right after Bristol Motor Speedway adopted a variable-banking system in 2007. At the 2008 Night Race, Busch led 47 laps less than Kyle Larson’s total of 462 this Saturday. Indeed, it’s rare to see such domination on a short track. Almost sixteen years later, the Rowdy one struggled for speed all day and finished P25 with very little to cheer for. Regardless, in the words of Kyle Larson after the race, “We (the #5 team) dominate a lot of races, but we might not close them all out, so it was really good to close one out in this HendrickCars.com Chevy.” 

Although he is the sixth-best averaging full-time driver in NASCAR right now, Larson has only won four times in his last 56 appearances on tracks under a mile in length. So, there’s some truth to his statement. Besides, it’s not like the same driver wins all the short-track races in this Next-Gen car. However, the tendency for a few to be frequent front-runners at venues like Bristol and Richmond is almost a given. Denny Hamlin, NASCAR’s current statistical ‘short-track king,’ won the last two races at Bristol consecutively before Larson. He finished 4th for Joe Gibbs Racing in this year’s Night Race.

But ultimately, the ones who came out on top were Hendrick Motorsports. All 4 drivers hovered around the top 10 the entire day, except William Byron, who settled for one less stage point in Stage 2 and ended up finishing 17th. Now, the field has gotten smaller for all those dreaming about a Bill France Cup. This playoff will once again pit teammate against teammate. Rival against rival, and most likely a few contenders against some former champions. Who will fall, and who will remain? We prepare for the next round in only a few weeks at Kansas Speedway.