CONCORD, N.C. -- Chase Elliott and the No. 9 team are returning to Martinsville Speedway this weekend to defend their epic November 2020 win.
While Elliott’s 2020 season finished with the ultimate bang, the team has kept its eyes forward for the 2021 season. Crew chief Alan Gustafson is trying to drown out the noise surrounding the No. 9 team’s return to “The Half Mile of Mayhem” and focus on performing as flawlessly as possible at the challenging track.
“We haven’t had a really good, clean race and executed a race that was kind of normal without any issues, so we’re just trying to go do our job. We’re trying to not get too high or too low, regardless of the circumstances,” Gustafson said. “Winning there last year, that was last year. It’s not going to give us any advantage this year, so we just got to go do our jobs and try and execute a nice, clean race and get a good result.”
While Elliott has had speed this season, incidents on the track and one unfortunate engine failure have relegated him to a season-high second-place finish so far this year. Gustafson said some of those items are out of the crew’s control but he, Elliott and the rest of the team are doing what they can to fine tune any performance aspects to the No. 9 Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 1LE.
“You’re just always trying to improve on all the aspects of the car, the pit stops, the strategy, what Chase does,” Gustafson said. “From the team side, I don’t feel like there’s any huge, glaring issues. We just have to make sure we continue to improve and clean up little issues that have been blighting us.”
After the NASCAR Cup Series had an off weekend to rest and recharge, the field now will take on its second short track in a row. Gustafson will be applying his notes from the Round of 8 race at the .526-mile venue to Saturday’s event but also will take the time to enjoy the intensity that accompanies any race at Martinsville.
“It’s one of my favorite tracks to race at,” Gustafson said. “It’s a lot of fun to go there. You’re really, really close to the action. You can see all the way around the track, you can see the cars where we’re pitting in stall two, you’re 40 feet away, so everything’s really close.
“It’s a cool place and it’s a place where if your car is good, you can kind of control your own destiny. You can pass and make time, and that’s always fun. It’s always a challenging track; it’s really unique and there’s always some circumstances that you didn’t account for that you got to overcome. I enjoy going there and it always has a lot of cool energy. It’s a fun place to race.”
The race at Martinsville will be under the lights Saturday night at 7:30 p.m. ET on FS1.