NASCAR CUP SERIES
ATLANTA MOTOR SPEEDWAY
TEAM CHEVY DRIVER QUOTES
FEBRUARY 22, 2025
Chase Elliott, driver of the No. 9 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet, met with the media ahead of the NASCAR Cup Series’ qualifying session at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
Media Availability Quotes:
Obviously with the fan following, anytime you come back here, it is going to be big with this being your home track. Does it ever get old coming back here and coming back into that sea of things again? What do you enjoy every time you get to come back here?
“I love coming here. I’ve said it a lot, but I’m glad we have two dates here at this track. There was a large investment made to try and make the track better — make it more exciting and I think they achieved all of those things, honestly. Yeah, I’m glad we still have the opportunity to come down here and get to do it twice a year, I think, is good. You know, it seems like the fan engagement and excitement has been elevated since the track reconfiguration and hopefully that continues to get better as time goes.”
We’re entering year four on this configuration and we’re really starting to see the surface wear out. Guys say that handling is much more key now. What has surprised you or stuck out to you as the surface has evolved here and the superspeedway style has changed?
“Yeah, I mean I didn’t think it had changed a whole lot last year, honestly. You know, I think we’re still on the slow side enough of the envelope that it’s OK. Now, like the Xfinity cars, they might get in that mid-range a little sooner than we will. But our cars are pretty draggy and slow here, so I think it will be a bit yet until it becomes an issue or handling becomes a huge issue. But I could be wrong.. I could be surprised today. It has seemed like this race, being colder weather, is always a little more difficult just getting the tires to heat up, particularly with your qualifying lap and the way the cars are configured. But it seems like when the race gets going, you get some temperature in things and some heat, that always seems to help a little bit and everyone gets brave again.”
What is your outlook on racing at these tracks? You do so well at Daytona, Talladega and Atlanta. You race really well and then maybe some crazy ends up happening, like what happened in the DAYTONA 500. Do you like racing this style? And secondly, how do you put that behind you and go? Have you just adapted that attitude that that’s going to happen?
“Yeah, I don’t necessarily know that it’s my favorite style of racing to participate in, but it is definitely a style of racing that you really have to learn to at least accept and try and learn how to get better at, and really just understand that there’s not just two or three on the schedule anymore. You know, when you look at the schedule, you have two Atlanta’s, two Daytona’s, two Talladega’s, right? When you come to that conclusion, it’s like — well we better really try and race this, improve and figure out a way to make these races count for the better because, if not, you’re just throwing too much of the season away. So I think that, historically, you could kind of get away with not worrying about the speedway races with where they fell on the calendar and the fact there wasn’t as many of them. But I don’t really think that’s the case anymore.
So there’s that side of it. The side of it from, like last week, and how do you bounce back from that. Honestly, I wouldn’t do anything different than we did last weekend. Was I disappointed in the result? Absolutely. You know, certainly felt like we were better than that. But when I just look at the week of work that we put in and the preparation that went in — we had probably our best car in the Next Gen era down there for a DAYTONA 500, so I thought that was great. All the things that I ask of and I talk about being important to me at drafting tracks, I thought we executed all of those things on Sunday. So, you know, the lane that I chose ended up going backwards at the end of the race. But at the end of the day, when you kind of just look at the global landscape of what the week was like, what our performance was like, the execution throughout the race — it’s really, and I’m a pretty honest person, it’s hard for me to give our team a bad grade. I felt like we did a pretty good job.”
In qualifying, can you still go out and run flat-out here, or is it that because the surface has aged a little bit, you can’t do that? How do you know with no practice?
“Yeah, you’re going to try, for sure. You’re certainly going to enter the corner wide open as if you can. If you get in there and you realize that the grip level doesn’t feel right or something, then you try and bail out and hopefully be smooth doing it. I don’t think we’re to the point where — like I was saying a second ago, we’re not to a point where we’re not going to run wide open around here. The challenge is – what makes this unique and different with qualifying and why sometimes it looks a little sketchy on TV and sometimes why it is a little sketchy for us – is because the tires are cold, the cars are on the ground because they’re trying to take drag out of them, right? So you’re sitting on the shock stops and it’s just really uncomfortable, bumpy and rough. And you’re sitting on a tire that ultimately becomes your spring at that point, right? And it’s cold and has no grip. So you combine all of those things together and it’s cold outside, that’s why it’s kind of sketchy. But you pick the cars up off the ground and you had any heat in them whatsoever, you’re going to run around here wide open, no problem. So it’s just a matter of balancing that out a little bit.”
What has made this track more agreeable to the drivers as the years have gone on? How it’s worn or just different factors?
“I can’t speak for the rest of them, but for me, living pretty close by, I hear comments and I hear opinions about the race and people that actually come and attend and watch the races — so it’s much easier, I think for me, to kind of get behind it when I see the positive reaction to a race and people kind of speaking highly of the race track because for so many years, I heard nothing but the opposite. So I think that it’s easy for me to be like – well you know what, that was fun for us, but the people that came down here and watched didn’t really love that. And now, it’s totally reversed. I think some of the drivers probably don’t necessarily love that we added two more speedways. But the people that come down here and support us seem to really like that. So that’s why I can get onboard with it, just because I’ve interacted with the people that attend this track probably a little more than others.”
How much more taxing is the speedway-style racing here compared to Daytona and Talladega, given the shorter distance and you’re on the straightaways for a short amount of time?
“Yeah, I mean certainly everything happens a little quicker, right? Like runs are developing faster.. you know, if you get pushed out, it seems like you kind of slinky back a little quicker. So I feel like it’s very much like a speedway, everything is just condensed and it happens in a shorter period of time. The work load can be higher. On the same note, the race is – I think it’s 400 miles this weekend and the laps go by pretty quick, so the race really isn’t that long. It doesn’t seem like it’s that long, to me. You kind of get both sides of the fence, right? Things are happening a little quicker. It can be maybe a little chaotic throughout the event, but also it seems like it goes by pretty fast, too.”
When you look at the start of the season, we’re going to two drafting-style race tracks into a road course and then the one-mile fast Phoenix Raceway. Are these first couple of races, the first month or so, kind of deceiving of where everyone is going to stack up? Will we not really know that until the end of March or even April?
“I think that’s totally fair. You know, it used to be like — let’s get like a month in or something. That will probably still be true. Really, I think by the time you get through – where do we go.. from COTA, to Phoenix, to Las Vegas? I think by the time you get through Vegas, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what’s going on, truthfully, at that point. So you’ve delayed it a week, basically, with the second speedway and the road course thing. But you know, the road course thing — in the past, I would agree that it was kind of an outlier. Well now, we have 15 of them, it seems like, so they kind of matter, too. It used to be that you could get away with just not being a road racer for two weeks a year, and it didn’t really matter because it was in the summer. If you ran good, great. And if you didn’t, no big deal, right? Where now, you have so many of them so you kind of have to embrace. I would argue that that one matters, as well.”
Heading to COTA next weekend and the new reconfiguration, do you see that changing the racing much at all and how are you preparing for it?
“Yeah, a little bit.. trying to. It’s kind of one of those things where it’s tough because the only thing you can do is simulator work, right, until you can get some eyes on it. The good news is that we’ve got some practice next week to understand the reconfiguration. I do not have my head wrapped around it completely at this point. I mean, I know what it’s supposed to look like, but I think until you really get out there and feel it – for me, it’s always hard to kind of understand exactly how things are going to be. And I kind of hate guessing because I don’t want to guess wrong in that situation, so I just kind of look forward to practice, honestly, more than anything. I would have to imagine it will change the racing a little, I would think, just based off the way it’s shaped. So hopefully it gives more opportunities to get crafty; have some more options, opportunities to pass or just be different. If it does, great. And if it doesn’t, it’ll look like it has for the last few years out there.”
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