Chase Elliott’s winless streak is over.
Elliott made it through multiple overtime restarts to get his first win since 2022 at Texas Motor Speedway on Sunday. Elliott got past Ross Chastain on the penultimate lap after the two drivers restarted on the front row and had the lead when Chastain went crashing off William Byron’s bumper down the backstretch on the final lap.
The 2020 Cup Series champion hadn’t won a race since he took the checkered flag at Talladega in October of 2022. It was a streak of 42 races.
The race featured 16 cautions including the yellow flag for Chastain’s crash on the final lap. That ties a track record that was set in 2022 despite Sunday’s race being 100 miles shorter than every other Texas race until 2023.
Two of the cautions came as drivers were battling for the lead, including with three scheduled laps to go. Denny Hamlin crashed while he was on the outside of Elliott as his car suddenly lost traction and hit the wall.
After the race, Elliott called Texas “sketchy” and that’s a good way to describe the track since it was reconfigured in 2017. The track is slick and has never been able to consistently produce multiple grooves in the corners for drivers to go side-by-side. Over 100 laps before Hamlin crashed in Turn 4, Michael McDowell crashed out of second place when his car wasn’t on the bottom of the track.
