Remember when we were wondering if Chase Elliott — in the midst of multiple 40-plus-race winless streaks during the 2024 and 2025 seasons — had a high enough ceiling to consistently win races?
Clearly, that’s not a concern anymore. After snapping a 44-race drought last June at his home-state track (EchoPark Speedway), it took Elliott just 12 races to win his next one (in September at Kansas) … then only 11 more until Martinsville this March … and now, just three before his most recent in Texas.
If you’re sensing a pattern, it’s that Elliott’s winning drives are becoming more frequent — a callback to earlier seasons like 2020 and 2022 when he won every 7.2 races, on average. But the impressive thing about Elliott’s development as a driver is that he hasn’t abandoned his high-floor approach from his drought era, either. Instead, he’s found an optimal way to blend going for wins with managing solid finishes every week.
Elliott’s average finish of 8.9 in 2026 ranks second among Cup drivers, trailing only Tyler Reddick’s 5.7 — which makes sense, given Reddick’s winning percentage matches his car number (45 percent). But in their non-wins, Elliott is much closer (10.7 versus Reddick’s 9.7), and over the past season-and-a-half or so nobody has been better at consistently avoiding bad finishes. Here’s a look at every Cup Series driver with at least 10 races since the start of 2025, sorted by their median finish but with their 10th-percentile finish — basically a “really bad day” benchmark they surpass 90% of the time — highlighted:
Chart showing how Chase Elliott has a higher statistical floor than other drivers.
Elliott’s worst days (with a 10th-percentile finish of 22.4) are better than a number of lower-tier drivers’ median showings — and even better than merely below-average outings from some other contenders. The only other drivers even remotely in the same neighborhood in avoiding disastrous days are Reddick (24.8) and Chris Buescher (26.6), and even they aren’t that close.
In a season when everyone seems to be putting emphasis on protecting their finishes from major harm, due to the influence of the new Chase championship format, Elliott still ranks as the best there is at doing that. But does that give him an advantage toward winning his second career Cup Series title?
Under the current format, avoiding bad Sunday runs is certainly valuable. For one thing, it helps you ensure a spot in The Chase itself — and Elliott already has a 174-point cushion over the No. 17-ranked driver, Joey Logano after 11 races.
Before the season, we reconstructed Chase points for previous years under the old system, calculating that it would take somewhere between 580 and 600 points to secure the No. 16 seed at regular season’s end. Elliott is just 181 points shy of 590 with 15 races left in the regular season; to get there, he’d need to average merely 12.1 points per race, which works out to a 25th-place finish (before considering stage points). We just got done showing that Elliott never finishes that low, so this explains why he effectively has 100% odds to get into the Chase, joining Reddick, Denny Hamlin and Ryan Blaney in that regard.
Avoiding disaster is also essential during The Chase itself. According to my simulation-based Chase odds, a contending driver’s chance to win the title gets cut roughly in half with each successive finish outside the top 20 in a Chase race:
Graphic showing a driver
The only issue with a “high-floor” type of strategy is that, eventually, you do also have to directly outscore the points leaders, which is why Elliott’s championship hopes also hinge on those all-important Chase seeds.
We know championship points are reset before the final 10 races on the calendar, based on a driver’s placement in the final regular-season standings. But the gaps between different slots in the seedings are not equal; No. 1 starts The Chase with a 25-point lead over No. 2, who has a 10-point lead over No. 3, whose lead over No. 4 is five points. (That’s the standard gap between each successive slot; No. 15 also starts out five points ahead of No. 16.)
That means the value of being No. 2 versus No. 3 is in automatically being about 30% closer to the leader, while No. 3 is about 15% closer than No. 4. It’s much easier to execute a high-floor game plan, minimizing mistakes and capitalizing on those made by others, the closer you are to the top.
That means the fight around who’s in those slots should begin to take focus as we look ahead to the last 15 races before The Chase field is solidified. Reddick is nearly unassailable for No. 1 with his 109-point lead over second-ranked Denny, sitting at about 80% odds to win the regular-season title as things currently stand. But the battle to grab another of those valuable seeds is still very much up in the air, with Hamlin, Elliott and Blaney primarily doing battle over who’ll finish 2-3-4 heading into the Chase:
Graphic showing how Denny Hamlin, Chase Elliott and Ryan Blaney are in a big fight over seeds 2-3 in The Chase.
That fight will continue to rage this weekend at Watkins Glen (3 p.m. ET, FS1, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), where Blaney should have an edge on Elliott based on projected road-course prowess — it not being 2020 or 2021 anymore — but Elliott, in turn, is due for a better showing than Hamlin, which feeds into the pressure already starting to build around each remaining race. Calculating the leverage index on a driver’s seeding status based on how he finishes at The Glen, Hamlin and Elliott have the most potential swing in their odds of a top-two seed this weekend, while Elliott and Blaney have the most swing around their odds for a top-three seed:
Graphic showing a driver
Elliott’s combined ability to avoid catastrophes while still gunning for checkered flags will undoubtedly help him in that effort. In a format where one bad day can begin to undo everything, even at this early phase of the proceedings, that kind of downside protection is already starting to look like a big competitive advantage.
