NASCAR star Chase Elliott has admitted that the last couple of years have been a struggle for him, confessing that he's had 'a lot' of bad weekends.

The 2020 Cup Series champion's change in trajectory appears to coincide with a fractured tibia early in 2023, although he still insists that his struggles began in late 2022 as other drivers got to grips with the Next Gen car.

Elliott didn't win any of the 29 races he started in 2023, not winning again until Texas in 2024 – his only win that year – before running consistently in 2025 and picking up a pair of wins.

However, he attributes a lot of those good early-season signs to simply avoiding getting in big wrecks, claiming that his good fortune skewed the numbers to look better than they were, and insisted that he didn't start to feel good about his performance until well into the playoffs.

Elliott: It's been hard work

The popular 30-year-old told ESPN: "I thought some of the opening speedway races went well. Truthfully, I think some of the numbers were reflected by the fact that we didn't get caught up in the wrecks. And that skews things, right, when you have fewer numbers there early in the season.

"I really didn't feel like our performance got to its peak until probably the last month or month and a half of the season. That's when I felt like, 'Hey, we're leading some laps and just more competitive and giving ourselves more opportunities'."

Speaking about his hopes of claiming multiple wins in a year for just the second time since 2022, he added: "It's been a lot of hard work. There's been a lot of really bad weekends and days that you go home just miserable, and you just want to, not throw in the towel, but figure it out. And I'm not even saying figure it out tomorrow, but one step. One step at a time.

"Look, Atlanta was a speedway race. Kansas, I thought we were actually really competitive throughout the day ... and for that, I can be proud. We were in the picture and I can be super proud of that, of the efforts, and of the whole thing. So, I look for more weekends like that."

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