Grateful Chase Elliott Tips the Hat for NASCAR’s Decision to Uphold the Olympic Break

NASCAR drivers have a really packed schedule for the entire season. This includes reporting to their team shops, drawing race plans, attending meetings, and then traveling to a different state for the races. With 36 races every year, it’s a laborious task if you really care to look at it, and the off-season is almost the prep time for the upcoming season. So there’s hardly any break. However, thanks to the Paris 2024 Olympics, the teams and drivers will get a mid-season break from July 20 to August 17.

With NBC having the duty to telecast the second half of the NASCAR Cup Series TV schedule and also the Olympics, NASCAR will take a two-week break during the summer. A similar thing happened during the 2021 season of the Tokyo Olympics. This break is indeed a relief to the drivers to rethink and reset. Explaining its significance, Chase Elliott even suggested a regular mid-season break not just once every four years, but every season.

Elliott wants the mid-season break to be a recurring theme for every Cup Series season

This two-week Olympic break also means the 2024 season will end a week later than it usually does. The season finale race at Phoenix is scheduled for November 10. Darlington will keep its annual Labor Day weekend date intact, so it will serve as the final race for the regular season. Meanwhile, Daytona, which has served as a regular-season finale in recent years, will host the second to last regular season race.

Chase Elliott, speaking in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, shared his thoughts on the mid-season break. “I can speak for everybody in the garage that travels the circuit every week, having those two weeks is a really big deal. I think just to give everybody a little bit of a chance to reset, 38 weeks is a long time on the road, especially when you’re doing it every week.

“I’m sure there’s fans that wish we were racing those couple of weeks, but I think industry-wide, it’s a necessary time for everyone to kind of hit the reset button and I think it’s a great time of year to do it. I really think that two-week stretch in the summer would be a nice addition for our schedule on a yearly basis, especially as we’ve taken away some of the random off weeks that we’ve had.”

Also during the interview, Elliott shared his plans for a comeback after a substandard performance last season.

Being competitive every week is Elliott’s target for the 2024 Cup Series season

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Here are the three stats that would paint a gloomy picture of Chase Elliott’s 2023 season. He failed to register even a single win throughout the season for the first time since 2017. He missed the playoff berth for the very first time in his Cup Series career. Last but not least, he placed #17, his career-worst finish in the overall points standings. Getting out of such a tricky spot won’t be an easy task, even for Elliott, and therefore he has carefully laid out the plans to tackle the season.

“I just want to be competitive and be a contender every week, that’s all I’m asking because I am a believer that if you’re doing that on a weekly basis, you’re going to have your fair share of wins, you’re going to have your fair share opportunities to win championships and have good weeks…The wins are great, of course I want to win 10 races and win a championship, everyone does, but I think just being competitive on a weekly basis, that is what wins the opportunities and that’s the goal every year.”

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With the home race at Atlanta Motor Speedway right around the corner, Elliott could well break his winless streak this weekend. And who knows? This could well spark a much-needed comeback for the HMS driver.