Chase Elliott seeks improved performance as he request for a new..

It’s easy to wonder what might have been for Chase Elliott this past season, but he doesn’t view it that way.

After missing seven races, Elliott failed to make the Cup playoffs for the first time in his career. He also went winless in the series for the first time since 2017.

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“You miss seven races and that ruins your year,” Elliott said. “I don’t buy that.

“Yes, we would have made the driver (playoffs) if I had just run in those events more than likely. I don’t think that would have just fixed our problems and we would have been a contender like we want to be because of that.”

As Elliott reflects on this past season, he said the 2022 Cup playoffs — where he reached the Championship 4 — proved to be a sign of what was to come this season.

“I think that the things that we started struggling with last year continued on to this year,” Elliott said. “It was really a reflection of where we left off the season (in 2022) and, unfortunately, we just never figured some of those things out and got better.”

In the 2022 Cup playoffs, Elliott won one race and finished second in another but had seven finishes outside the top 10. He advanced to the title race with the help of the playoff points he earned during the season.

Elliott ran only two points races this season before he was injured in a snowboarding accident and missed the next six events. After he came back, Elliott had three top-10 finishes in the next six races. NASCAR suspended him a race after wrecking Denny Hamlin during the Coca-Cola 600.

Upon Elliott’s return, he scored three consecutive top-five finishes. That led to talk about how he still could make the playoffs on points despite missing all those races. Elliott always insisted he needed to win. That proved to be the case.