Chase Elliott is back at Texas Motor Speedway this weekend, the site of his last NASCAR Cup Series points-paying victory. That win occurred more than a year ago, on April 24, 2024, ending a 42-race winless drought at the time.
Now, Elliott arrives in Fort Worth facing a 37-race winless streak in points competition, dating back to that Texas event last spring. His single points victory in the last 80 Cup starts marks a shift from his earlier career when wins were more frequent.
From 2018 through 2022, Chase Elliott posted 18 victories in 180 races, achieving a 10 percent winning rate. During that five-year period, he never went longer than 26 races without a win.
Since the start of the 2023 season, his winning percentage stands at 1.3 percent. High-tier finishes have also become less common, with fewer top-five and top-10 results compared to his peak years.
However, Elliott has shown improved consistency. He rarely finishes outside the top 20. In the 2018-2022 span, he finished outside the top 20 in 22 percent of starts. From 2023 through 2025, that rate has dropped to 12 percent.
This consistency has kept him high in the point standings. He finished last season seventh in the championship and earned the most top-10 finishes, top-five finishes, and laps led in a single season since 2022. His 11.7 average finish in 2024 was his best since 2021. He currently ranks fourth in the Cup standings, tracking for his highest points placement since 2022.
Data shows Elliott now ranks higher in Average Finish than metrics rewarding dominance or high finishes, a reversal from his winning heyday. His record against Hendrick Motorsports teammates has also trended downward since 2023.
Despite the lack of recent wins, Elliott is tied for the sixth-highest odds to win the Cup championship this year. He is expected to be a contender at upcoming tracks like Kansas, Charlotte, Michigan, and road courses, where he has historically performed well.
Returning to the track where he last won, Elliott reflected on the lessons learned during the winless stretches. "You just have to take those lessons and take the experience that comes with all that stuff and figure out how to make it better," Elliott said. "That's really all you can do, in my opinion. I feel like we've done a good job of that over the course of the last couple of years. We've had some good opportunities to win at different points in time, but certainly not on the consistent basis that I would like to see or that we expect of ourselves, and I expect of myself."
