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Elliott Tallies Top-Five Finish to Lead Chevrolet at the “Tricky Triangle”

NASCAR CUP SERIES POCONO RACEWAY TEAM CHEVY POST-RACE REPORT JUNE 22, 2025
 
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·        Chase Elliott paced Chevrolet to the finish of The Great American Getaway 400 Presented by VISITPA.COM at Pocono Raceway – taking the checkered flag in the fifth position to earn the No. 9 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet team’s fifth top-five finish this season. Elliott was among just five drivers to earn points in each stage of the 400-mile race – ending the series’ annual trip to the Pennsylvania oval with a strong 43-point day. The result extends Elliott’s top-10 streak at Pocono Raceway to now four-straight. 
 ·        Spire Motorsports’ Carson Hocevar put together yet another strong showing throughout the Pocono Race weekend – starting with a third-place qualifying effort to lead Team Chevy to the green flag in the series’ 17th points-paying race of the season. The 22-year-old Michigan native stayed steady in the top-five through the opening laps before early pit strategy brought the No. 77 Chevrolet to pit road for the team’s first scheduled stop in the closing laps of Stage One. Continuing to carry speed throughout the race, Hocevar went on to collect points in Stage Two before taking the checkered flag with a 18th-place result.    ·        With NASCAR’s top division entering the single-digit countdown to the end of the regular season, a familiar face continues to stand atop the driver points standings. Fighting an uphill battle following an incident in qualifying, William Byron and the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet team took advantage of pit strategy to collect points in each stage – ultimately leaving Pocono with a six-point lead over Christopher Bell. 
TEAM CHEVY UNOFFICIAL TOP-10 RESULTS: POS.     DRIVER5th – Chase Elliott7th – Kyle Larson
Chevrolet’s season statistics with 17 NASCAR Cup Series races complete: 

Wins: 6Poles: 8Top-Fives: 35Top 10s: 71Stage Wins: 16
UP NEXT: The 2025 NASCAR Cup Series season continues at EchoPark Speedway with Quaker State 400 Available at Walmart on Saturday, June 28, at 7 p.m. ET. Live coverage can be found on TNT, PRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio Channel 90.
Post-Race Driver Quotes:Chase Elliott, No. 9 Hendrick Motorsports ChevroletFinished: 5th“We were just really loose in (turn) three. I felt like I could pace pretty good through turns one and two, but I just could not get turn three right all day. Certainly as the run went on, it became more challenging for me and I started making more and more mistakes over there. I thought Denny (Hamlin) and Ryan (Blaney) could do a better job of kind of stalking the person in front of them to get themselves opportunities. I was just a little bit too far back and I think it was mainly because of that. But overall, happy to get a fifth-place finish for this No. 9 NAPA Chevy team.”   Kyle Larson, No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports ChevroletFinished: 7thYou showed a lot of pace there at the end and you scored stage points in Stage Two. Talk about your day here at Pocono Raceway…“It was an up-and-down day. It was really hard to pass. It was a good fight for the No. 5 HendrickCars.com Chevy team to get a seventh-place finish, and for three Hendrick Motorsports cars to get top-10 results. I just hope we don’t carry what we had the last few weeks into the rest of the season. Prior to the last few weeks, we’ve been really fast. It’s just been a rough stretch, but we’ll continue to go to work.”    Daniel Suarez, No. 99 Trackhouse Racing ChevroletFinished: 15th“It was an average day for the No. 99 Very Good Ventures Chevrolet team. We started the race OK on the short run, but then in the final stage, we just lost the balance of the car a little bit. We were just way too tight and never got it back.”   Michael McDowell, No. 71 Spire Motorsports ChevroletMcDowell endured a brake failure in Stage Two, ultimately ending the No. 71 Spire Motorsports Chevrolet team’s day early at Pocono Raceway.Finished: 35th Did you have any warning that your brakes were going out? “Yeah, I had warning half of the race that the brakes weren’t going to make it. It’s unfortunate. It wasn’t what we needed for this No. 71 Gainbridge Chevrolet team. We came off a good weekend (in Mexico City), and this is the exact opposite of what we needed. But we have Atlanta, Chicago and Sonoma coming up, so we have a lot of good tracks on the horizon for our team. The season is grueling sometimes.  I was just trying to nurse it there at the end on that last restart, knowing I was starting to lose my pedal a little bit. In the car, there’s not a lot you can do other than dial bias to the rear and hope and pray for the best. What put us behind this weekend was yesterday in qualifying. I just made a mistake there, and that kind of sets you up for the whole race starting 28th. We did some strategy there and we were going to give ourselves a fighting chance. But like I said, I knew we had an issue with the brakes and I was trying to get to a place where hopefully they would last, but they didn’t. ” Does this put more emphasis on winning moving forward? “No, that’s been the mindset anyways. I’ve been telling you guys all year that I’m not planning on pointing my way in… I’m planning on winning a race because that’s the way I see us getting into the playoffs. You’re going to have weekends like this where you have issues, you get taken out or you have something happen. You can’t plan on pointing your way in, especially this early on because there’s still a lot of opportunities for guys below the cutline to win, as we saw last weekend. When you have places like Atlanta, Chicago, Sonoma, Daytona, you’ve got a lot of tracks that it could open it up for a new winner, like we saw with Harrison Burton last year. That last few years, there’s been a few surprise winners.” What is it about this place that’s leading to the brake issues? “Yeah, I’m not sure. I don’t know if it’s the teams pushing more. Obviously, for us, this is a different team, a different car, a different package than what we ran here in the past. But I think the brakes have been fairly close here at times. Obviously there’s really long straightaways and high braking zones, so the brakes heat and cool and heat and cool. Those cycles can hurt the rotors, and I think that’s what we saw today. We’ll look at it and see what we could have done differently.”