DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — As Chase Elliott puts last year’s winless season behind him, he does look back on one thing.
“When you have a year like last year, it is really easy for a team to blow up from the inside, like really easy. You don’t know how easy,” Elliott said Wednesday at Daytona International Speedway.
“When I look at where our team is at, mentally and just our drive and our will and our willingness to fight and not quit, I think it is at an all-time high, to be honest with you.”
Elliott also said that his relationship with crew chief Alan Gustafson entering their ninth season together “ is as good as it’s ever been.”
Elliott goes into Sunday’s Daytona 500 winless in his last 34 Cup starts. His last Cup victory came in October 2022 at Talladega.
“There is a sense of a new opportunity and I’m appreciative of that,” he said of the start of a new season. “There’s also realistic understanding that your problems don’t disappear because of the calendar change from ’23 to ’24. We know that we need to be better, and I need to be better, and intend on continuing to build on what we were working on at the end of last year, and just keep our heads down and keep pushing.”
Should he win Sunday’s race, it would be his first victory in this event and the first Daytona 500 win for Hendrick Motorsports since Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s victory in 2014.
“To be candid, that’s just the way it goes sometimes,” Elliott said of Hendrick Motorsports’ drought in the season opener. “It’s a hard race to win. You have to have quite a few things go your way. Unfortunately for HMS, it’s just been a while, but I think it’ll come back around.”
Guiding him this year will be a new spotter. Trey Poole, his cousin, takes over spotting duties after serving as an extra spotter at road course events. He takes over for Eddie D’Hondt, who is the spotter for rookie Josh Berry this season.
“When we were looking at doing something different, Trey has been around our team, and he understands how we operate,” Elliott said. “He’s spotted at the Cup level for me before. He’s spotted quite a bit of short track racing events for me before, so we felt like it was the right fit.
“At the end of the day, you just want a team that has performance at the top of mind all the time, and genuinely wants what’s best for us. Trey is that way, just like Eddie was. I don’t want that to be misunderstood either. It was just the right fit for our group, and a guy I know very well, and someone I think will contribute at a high level.”
