Elliott's championship hopes boil down to Martinsville must-win

Chase Elliott will need to win at Martinsville Speedway in the final elimination race of the NASCAR Cup Series postseason if he’s going to compete for the championship.

Elliott was collected in a nine-car wreck with nine laps to go in the first stage. It happened in Turns 3 and 4 when Erik Jones gave Noah Grason a bad push, which sent him sideways into AJ Allmendinger, who was leading the inside lane. Elliott's No. 9 was running the middle lane a few rows behind where the wreck started and collided with Austin Cindric.

The most significant damage to Elliott’s car occurred when he spun off the racetrack and was hit by the oncoming Austin Dillon. Elliott reported that the radiator was broken before the team pushed his car to the garage and found it unrepairable.

“I saw someone get turned sideways, kind of like normal, and you hope you can get slowed down in time,” Elliott said. “I haven’t seen it back, but I got turned sideways there somehow, someway, and hit some more stuff after that.”

The incident came after a round of green flag pit stops. Elliott felt he ended up in the wreck because of how things played out before and after the cycle.

“We had ourselves in a pretty good spot the way the sequence was, and we just did not execute that well, I feel like, as a group,” Eliott said. “We put ourselves back in the back of the pack, unfortunately, and we got caught up in the mess.”

Elliott was listed as the first driver out of the race and will finish 40th, last, in the YellaWood 500. He finished 18th in the first race in the Round of 8.