The math gets really simple for Chase Elliott in the aftermath of what happened on Sunday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
The 2020 Cup Series champion has to win.
Elliott was involved in the incident in which Martin Truex Jr. broke traction, shooting him up into the Hendrick Motorsports No. 9 and sending all of them into Tyler Reddick, who gunned the throttle trying to bypass it on the outside.
Ryan Blaney ran over debris from the incident and it left all three of the playoff drivers involved facing must-win odds over the next two weeks at Homestead-Miami and Martinsville.
“We have to win, and that’s kind of where my head was at going into last weekend,” Elliott said.
He started this round at nine points below the cutline but knowing that someone below him could even win and bump that number up even higher, was always on his mind. So yeah, now Elliott really has to win.
“So, nothing changes for me,” Elliott said. “I think that we’re in a position where we have to, we have to win one of the next two and that was our thought process going into Las Vegas. So, while it didn’t work out for us and we ended up worse than where we went in, I don’t think the goals change at all.
“This was really the position that we’ve kind of viewed ourselves in the whole time. I think we just keep the hammer down and try to try to get a win one of these next two weeks.”
Elliott said he wasn’t entirely demoralized about what happened on Sunday because the crash was a byproduct of running good. It happened because they were all up front.
That also gives him optimism for this week at Homestead.
“I think, fortunately for us, we were performing at a high level throughout the event,” Elliott said. “To me, that the best motivating factor – when you have good performance and you have good pace and you’re in contention.
“And I thought we were doing all those things. We were fast. We had gotten ourselves up inside the top-5 and our execution on pit road was really good. That to me makes it much easier when you’re having a good day and something just goes bad.
“We just have to keep working in the direction we were working this past weekend. We had a good thing going and we just hope that translates to Homestead. It’s easy to stay motivated when you have pace and were doing the right things.”
So, especially with Martinsville coming around the corner, is Elliott willing to find another less ethical way into the next round?
It’s not really his way.
“Again, our points situation is what it is and we are in the points situation that we are in for the next two weeks,” Elliott said. “What I would prefer is to just be faster than everyone else, call a good race, and execute a good day. That is how I would like to go about it.
“But there are other ways to win races too. You look at how Joey won Vegas, and those guys made a great call on pit road, threw a hail mary, and gave themselves a shot. He didn’t do anything silly behind the wheel to make that happen.
“But certainly, you can be aggressive in other ways, and there are examples throughout history there too.”
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.
