Chase Elliott’s stretch of unmatched consistency came to an end at arguably the worst possible time.

On Sunday, Elliott placed 26th in the NASCAR Cup Series event at Watkins Glen — marking his first finish outside of the top 20 in his last 26 races behind the wheel. The No. 9 Chevrolet driver struggled to break from the midpack for much of the afternoon, while his spotter took immediate blame for a bizarre error in the middle of the race. 

Shane van Gisbergen, meanwhile, won in dominant fashion en route to securing his fourth victory of the 2025 campaign. As for William Byron, he extended his first-place lead over Elliott in the Cup Series regular-season standings from 18 to 42 points by finishing P4.

With only two more races at Richmond and Daytona remaining before the playoffs kick off, time is running out for Elliott to catch his Hendrick Motorsports teammate. Prior to Sunday’s race, Alan Gustafson — his crew chief — challenged the 29-year-old to win another race and usurp Byron on the regular-season leaderboard.

“We obviously want to win the regular season, but more importantly than that, we want to win some races,” Gustafson told HendrickMotorsports.com. “I’m excited about Watkins Glen.

“Richmond is a race that, same thing, I like racing there. It’s a lot of fun. I’m excited to get there and we’ve been working on some new things, so we would like to try to incorporate that at Richmond and try to win that race. And Daytona, we were really good (in the DAYTONA 500) in February. That’s as good as we’ve been down there in a while.

“Anything can happen at any race anymore, and Daytona has a lot of randomness to it, but I feel good that we should be in as good of a position to go there and win as anybody. I think we’ve got three races to polish up as much as we can and go win and get to the playoffs. You’re always trying to be better but I think the team has been operating at a high level.

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“Certainly, there are things, and you always want to improve and if you look at the last couple of races, we haven’t gotten the finishes we wanted. But I feel like we know why the performance has been there in the car.”

If Elliott is to coast down victory lane again this season, his team can ill-afford to make the same mistakes that plagued their afternoon at Watkins Glen. On the final lap of Stage 1, his spotter advised him to conserve fuel since it was green checkered.

“Green, check it right here. It’s safe to save. Caution’s not out yet,” he said over the radio. In reality, however, the stage was not yet over. “That’s one more, isn’t it?” Elliott asked, prompting his spotter to reply: “Keep coming. Yeah, that’s on me. F—.”