![\"Chase](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Chase-Elliott-Martinsville-e1775535612460.jpg\")
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Chase Elliott celebrates his first win of the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series season.<\/p>\n
Throughout his NASCAR<\/a> Cup Series career, Chase Elliott has won a championship and 22 races.<\/p>\n However, early-season wins have historically been hard to come by for the Hendrick Motorsports driver. Until pretty much now, that is.<\/p>\n With his trip to Victory Lane in the most recent race, held March 29 at Martinsville Speedway, Elliott secured his earliest triumph in 11 seasons as a full-time Cup Series competitor.<\/p>\n And the fact that his first trip to Victory Lane came just seven races into the season was not lost on the Hendrick Motorsports<\/a> driver.<\/p>\n How Did Chase Elliott React To Triumphing So Quickly Out of the Gate?<\/p>\n Scoring an early-season win, or any win in the regular season, doesn\u2019t carry as much weight as it did leading up to this year. That\u2019s because a victory no longer locks a driver into the playoffs like it did under the old championship format<\/a> that had been in place from 2014-2025.<\/p>\n But a win is still a win. Not only does it inevitably mean a good points day for a driver and team, but it also boosts their morale and builds momentum. And those realities are best not ignored.<\/p>\n Especially when you\u2019re Chase Elliott, a driver who typically doesn\u2019t hit his stride until around the midway point of the season. So it\u2019s no wonder that Elliott, NASCAR\u2019s perennial Most Popular Driver<\/a>, was keenly aware of the significance of winning so quickly. At least for him.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cYeah, that was one of the first things I thought about,\u201d Elliott said during his post-race winner\u2019s press conference at Martinsville. \u201cI was like, \u2018Man, this is awesome. We\u2019ve never done that.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n CHASE ELLIOTT WINS AT MARTINSVILLE!! <\/p>\n Cheers from Martinsville \ud83d\udc4a\ud83c\udffc\ud83d\udd70\ufe0f <\/p>\n Chase Elliott Encouraged But Still Sees Room For Growth<\/p>\n Given that Elliott wasted little time getting a win this year, the question now becomes what that win means for the rest of his season. Although the win doesn\u2019t guarantee him entry into the playoffs under the new championship format, that shouldn\u2019t be any major cause for concern.<\/p>\n In prevailing at Martinsville, Elliott moved up a spot in the standings and now sits fourth. He\u2019s just 10 points behind third-place Denny Hamlin and just 22 points behind second-place Ryan Blaney.<\/p>\n Given that the top 16 points finishers at the end of the 26-race regular season will now all qualify for the playoffs, Elliott seems like a virtual lock to make it in. And based on the rapid rate (at least for him) at which he reached Victory Lane, he may be primed for his best season in quite some time.<\/p>\n Since capturing the Cup Series title in 2020, Elliott has finished no better than fourth in the standings. And from 2023-2025, he took the checkered flag running P1 a total of just three times.<\/p>\n Prior to prevailing at Martinsville, the Dawsonville, Georgia native had recorded only two top-five finishes in the first six events of 2026. He rolls off from the 18th starting spot on Sunday at Bristol Motor Speedway<\/a>, a track where he\u2019s winless in 17 Cup Series starts.<\/p>\n \u201cI know we still have a lot of room for improvement,\u201d Elliott said. \u201cDon\u2019t get me wrong. But (winning was a) great way to kind of cap off this first stretch. A lot of good momentum for the whole organization, honestly, I think.\u201d <\/p>\n \n\t\t\tJared Turner<\/a> A NASCAR contributor at Heavy Sports since April 2026, Jared Turner brings more than 20 years of motorsports journalism experience to the role. Before graduating magna cum laude with a degree in mass communication from Virginia Tech, he was already working as a reporter for one of Virginia’s largest newspapers, The Roanoke Times where he covered the local short-track scene in Southwest Virginia and beyond. Since then, Jared has held full-time or freelance writing roles for FOX Sports, NASCAR.com, SPEED Channel, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene Magazine, NASCAR Pole Position Magazine, Frontstretch.com, Sportscasting.com, The Greensboro News & Record and the Daily Downforce. An award-winning writer, he has interviewed around 25 NASCAR Hall of Famers, covered three Daytona 500s on-site, and been published in more than 50 NASCAR souvenir programs. More about Jared Turner<\/a>\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\tMore Heavy on NASCAR\n\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\tLoading more stories\n\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Getty Chase Elliott celebrates his first win of the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series season. Throughout his NASCAR Cup…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":598550,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[49,48,634,82],"class_list":["post-598549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nascar","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nascar","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=598549"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598549\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/598550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=598549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=598549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=598549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}