After missing six races due to a broken tibia, Chase Elliott will be back behind the wheel of the #9 NAPA Chevrolet for this weekend’s NASCAR Cup race at Martinsville.
While Elliott has talked openly about his mindset returning from a major injury suffered while snowboarding, he’s not shared some thoughts on this weekend’s race and his expectations.
“Martinsville is certainly going to be a challenge,” Elliott said on Thursday. “I don’t anticipate any of them to be easy. They’re never easy anyway, but certainly when you’ve been sitting out and your competitors have been racing and continuing to sharpen those tools and I haven’t.
“I do think it’s going to be tough, but I certainly believe we can go up there and have a really strong performance and get back in the groove. But we’ve got to have our ducks in a row, and I think it’d be good just to get back in the swing of things, and we’ll kind of see where it goes from there.”
Elliott also discussed how the injury happened and how bummed he was afterward.
“Landed on my knee wrong and went down,” Elliott told NBC Sports on Thursday. “I wish I had a cooler story to tell. That’s what I told a lot of my friends. It was nothing. Nothing cool. Not a cool part of the area. Just kind of that perfect storm of hitting the right way and tweaking your knee in just the right spot.”
“They had to drag me down the hill. I hated to be that guy. There was no way I was going to ride (the snowboard) down that point. I didn’t want to hurt it worse. I just didn’t think that was the right thing. My buddy that was there was great, just helping get things facilitated, logistics coordinated. Folks came and scooped me up and off we went.”
Elliott can start putting the freak injury behind him on Sunday where he hopes to win in Martinsville for the first time since Nov. 2020.
