After an ill-timed caution in the closing laps, Chase Elliott went from leading the race to out of position and lost another potential victory.
The driver of the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet took control of the race from teammate Jimmie Johnson on lap 182. From that point on, he thoroughly commanded the race, only losing the lead during the final cycle of green flag pit stops.
Martin Truex Jr. was hot on his tail in the closing laps but wasn’t gaining the ground needed to catch him. Even Truex admitted this in his post-race media availability.
“I feel for Chase,” Truex said. “I know what he’s going through. He did a great job. I wasn’t going to catch him. I was catching him, but I was not catching him enough to pass him in five more laps. So I know what he’s going through. But obviously he did a good job and they were really fast today. We had to come from behind.
“No, to answer your question straight up, I don’t think we were going to be able to pass him unless he got loose or made a mistake. We weren’t catching him quick enough. That last run, I got pretty loose for some reason, having trouble getting off the corner. I was really struggling to run him down.
Then a shredded right rear tire from Michael McDowell’s car brought out the caution with five laps to go and changed the entire race.
When asked what went through his mind when the caution flew just as he had the race locked up, he said “nothing is yours until it’s over. I mean that is part of life man. You are not dumb, we have all watched this stuff long enough we know these races don’t go green that long. We see more cautions come out at the end of these races than we do not. That is just part of it, you’ve got to expect it and be able to embrace it and move forward. I feel like we did a good job controlling the things that we could control today.”
Elliott and all but three cars elected to pit, and Truex exited pit road first.
“Well if one less guy had stayed out then we would have been fourth,” Elliott said. “You never know how things are going to play out. Obviously, you hate to lose a spot on pit road, but our guys did a good job all day. They were solid and those are the kind of days we have to have on pit road. We will take it as motivation and move forward.”
Elliott was unable to make it past Joey Logano in the final two laps and had to settle for third.
During his post-race media availability, he was asked if the outcome was easier to accept than it was at Michigan.
“No, there is no easy outcome,” he said. “You know, it’s unfortunate. You hate to have it happen. As you get faced with these situations more than once, I think you learn. You learn from situation to situation. But like I said, I felt like we did a good job as a team today trying to control the things that we could control. And you can’t control when a caution is going to come out. Granted, you can expect one a lot of the time, but you can’t control when it’s going to happen, and you certainly can’t control how many guys are going to stay out on tires and try to make something happen at the end of a race. That’s just a part of life, part of racing.”
Despite the missed opportunity, Elliott added to his eight top fives and 14 top-10 finishes on the 2016 season. He also leaves sixth in the standings just 11 points out of first-place.
