Despite solid points standing, Chase Elliott's 2024 season is still underwhelming

If you looked at the NASCAR Cup Series points standings, you'd call anyone who says Chase Elliott is having a disappointing season crazy. 

The 2020 NASCAR Cup Series champion currently sits 10th in the playoff standings, 42 points above the cutline, and ninth in the regular season standings. 

Yet a closer look at Elliott's season, so far, indicates that just like his injury riddled 2023 campaign, he doesn't have the speed to contend for race wins, much less the championship. 

Going into 2023, Elliott had made three consecutive championship races, including the aforementioned 2020 race, which he won. However, after a leg injury while snowboarding, Elliott missed the spring Las Vegas race, not returning until Martinsville over a month later. 

The stretch of missing races, combined with a one-race suspension, after intentionally crashing Denny Hamlin in the Coca-Cola 600, resulted in Elliott missing the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs for the first time in his career. 

For a driver and team with a championship pedigree, it was shocking, even though they missed out on a lot of points with Elliott missing seven races in total. 2023 was essentially was wasted season, but 2024 was seen as a clean slate, a chance to wash away the painful memories of last year with a season that reinvigorated Elliott's rabid fan base and proved that he was still one of the sport's elite. 

Instead, Elliott and the once venerable No. 9 team are far from the winning pace. Their only top 10 is an eighth-place finish at Bristol. 

The latest moment that shows the team isn't where they once were? Elliott incurring a course-cutting penalty on himself at this past Sunday's race at Circuit of The Americas, where he won in 2021. 

While the penalty is understandable, as Elliott was out of control and needed to cut the course to avoid a possible wreck, it's another uncharacteristic mistake for a driver once crowned the best to ever grace a road course in NASCAR. 

It's not like Elliott has been wiped out from the lead late in races, either. He's only led 18 laps all season, with 13 of those coming in the season opening Daytona 500, and the other five at Bristol. The team is simply of peg or two off their teammates in William Byron and Kyle Larson. So what? The whole field is off a peg compared to Larson and Byron. 

But one driver really puts Elliott's 2024 struggles into perspective. Elliott's other teammate, Alex Bowman, had a similar season in 2023. The difference? The No. 48 team, while sitting lower in points, has punched back, with three top five finishes, which is more than all of their Hendrick teammates combined through the first six races. 

Elliott has proven to be a championship caliber driver. He even led the series in wins (five) in 2022, his last fully healthy season. But with a winless streak dating back to the fall of 2022, cars that lack race-winning speed and a fanbase getting antsy, it's time to turn on the afterburners and look competitive again. 

If there's one big takeaway from the first six races of the 2024 NASCAR season, it's this: Even for NASCAR's most popular driver, success is not anywhere close to guaranteed in a sport that takes no prisoners.