ELLIOTT TO ROLL? NOT SO FAST Daytona 500 poll doesn’t portend immediate success
DAYTONA BEACH, FLA . The optics are wonderful and sentimental. The symbolic fire-suited arm of Jeff Gordon handing the symbolic torch — or in this case, the Daytona 500 pole award — to his successor in the No. 24 Chevrolet.
Chase Elliott’s debut as a full-time Sprint Cup driver needed no more fanfare or pressure as he attempts to replace a fourtime series champion at Hendrick Motorsports. But that certainly will be the case after he captured his first career pole for NASCAR’s most celebrated race.
Luckily for him, however, in a race and a form of racing where machine means much more than driver, Elliott seemed to understand he was just along for the ride Sunday.
“I don’t feel like it’s about me,” said Elliott, the youngest Daytona 500 pole-winner at 20 years, 2 months, 17 days. “Nothing special I did to earn it. It’s about those guys, the kind of car they brought to the racetrack. That’s the biggest thing I look at.”
That perspective should be beneficial for Elliott but not necessarily good for the story line. This type of wonderful tale has
played out before. And it’s no harbinger of success. Elliott’s pole marked the third time since 2013 that a driver beginning his or her full-time Cup career won the pole. Danica Patrick became the first woman to start in front of a Cup race in 2013, finished eighth and has slogged through a fitful progression as a stock car driver since. Austin Dillon claimed it in 2014 in the first use of the No. 3 Chevrolet in a Cup points race since Dale Earnhardt’s death on the last lap of the 2001 Daytona 500. He, too, is groping for consistency entering his third full season at Richard Childress Racing.
Gordon won it last year in his final Daytona 500 attempt, another grand story, and entered the final race of his career with a chance at a fifth championship. But he’s long been the exception to norms.
Maybe Elliott is the one. The sport has been waiting for him for a while, since he became more than the son of two-time Daytona 500 winner and series champion Bill Elliott and the next young standard-bearer for a sport whose elites and fans are aging. He has the résumé as a 2014 champion of NASCAR’s top developmental series and a runnerup in 2015.
“I kind of take this week as a building block, especially today,” Chase Elliott said. “Just grow my respect for what they did over the offseason, just to give them thanks. Like I said, today is about them and what they accomplished.”
With the Daytona 500 not until next Sunday, NASCAR will have its coveted youth movement in media recounts for a week. Rookie Ryan Blaney qualifying seventh for the Wood Brothers enhances the angle.
But Blaney, like Elliott a son of a former NASCAR driver, also exudes an old soul from his 22-yearold persona, saying after qualifying that it was too early for all of that. He knows a good story when he sees one, though. And he didn’t seem at all jealous that the glare would be more focused on Elliott.
“I don’t know if you can say that the first race of the year,” he said of a youth takeover. “Congrats to him on the pole. That’s awesome. Those guys do a great job. He did a great job, too. It’s really cool to see the 24 and Chase on the pole. That’s a real cool story.
“Maybe ask that question in a couple months and I’ll be able to give you a better answer.”