1,000 Greatest Drivers: Chase Elliott

While his current performance is overrated, people sell his earlier career too short.

Elliott has lowkey kind of had a weird career that seems to oscillate between seasons where he runs better than he finishes and seasons when he finishes better than he runs. The kind of results fundamentalist fans who act like the Latford points system is the only valid points system will thereby argue that Elliott has been one of the best drivers this year because he has the best average finish and the most Latford-era points even though Kyle Larson has significantly outperformed him in literally every statistic that considers than more just results. On the flip side however, people invariably call Elliott a “Mickey Mouse champion” for winning the 2020 title even though Kevin Harvick beat him by most of the baseline statistics. When it came to advanced statistics, Elliott pretty much came out as roughly equivalent to Harvick and he did actually beat him in my teammate model in 2020, although he only finished second place that year because Kurt Busch got to benefit from being teammates with a washed-up Matt Kenseth. When you further consider that Hendrick Motorsports shut down during the COVID-19 lockdowns while Stewart-Haas Racing and Joe Gibbs Racing stayed open, that explains why Harvick and Denny Hamlin dominated all that summer while it took a while for Hendrick to catch up. While I wouldn’t criticize you if you thought Harvick had the best season in 2020 since there’s a strong case, Elliott’s season was also nowhere near bad enough to be called a “Mickey Mouse” championship especially after Harvick was eliminated, yet people will act like his current season is better than his 2020 because he’s been more consistent even though his actual performance was far better in 2020. I think when all is said and done and people look back on his career in retrospect, they will agree with me that that is the better season. As I mentioned in the Larson post yesterday, Elliott hasn’t even been less crash-prone than Larson since they both have 15 incidents this year, so what has his consistency been worth really? Just because the Latford points system was marginally less bad than the knockout playoffs does not mean it was itself a good measure of performance.