Chase Elliott Proving to Be Quick Learner After 2nd NASCAR Sprint Cup Start

In his first career Sprint Cup start last month at Martinsville, it was pretty clear that the normally cool and collected Chase Elliott was a wee bit nervous.

Well, as cool, collected and wee bit nervous as a 19-year-old can be.

After all, Elliott, had a lot to live up to in his Cup debut:

• He’s the son of NASCAR Hall of Famer Bill Elliott.
• He’s replacing legendary Jeff Gordon in the equally legendary No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet next season.
• He’s viewed as one of the brightest young stars on the NASCAR horizon.

So when Elliott took the green flag at Martinsville, it was pretty clear there were a lot of eyeballs upon him.

And like any 19-year-old kid with the spotlight on him, he didn’t want to disappoint.

To his credit, he had a decent start, but then he got into two scrapes, the latter that knocked him for a loop, and wound up finishing 38th in his Sprint Cup maiden voyage.

“I didn’t do my job like I needed to there and got us in a wreck 60 laps into the race, and that’s not the thing to do,” Elliott said.

The best way to rebound from something like that, as the late Frank Sinatra sang in “That’s Life,” was for Elliott to “pick myself up and get back in the race.”

That’s what the young man did Sunday in his second career Cup start, this time at Richmond.

Sure, there was still attention on him, but it wasn’t as riveting and overwhelming as at Martinsville.

There wasn’t as much pressure upon him, nor were there as many interviews or questions about how well he thought he’d finish.

Simply, Elliott went out to run a race—his kind of race, that is—and came away with a decent 16th-place finish.

Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images

He completed all 400 laps, finished on the lead lap, didn’t tear up his car, got up to as high as fifth place and emerged much more confident from this effort than he did after Martinsville.

Is Elliott ready for prime time…as in a full-time Sprint Cup ride next season with the most successful organization in the sport?

Team owner Rick Hendrick certainly thinks so, bestowing lofty praise upon Elliott after Sunday’s race, as he told NBCSports.com’s NASCAR Talk:

"

Chase drove such a good race. I think he drove up to 11th on the green, stayed out of trouble, great feedback.

He sounds just like a 10-year veteran, never gets rattled, good feedback, and the car was never off. For him to come out here and finish 16th, I’m really proud of him. That just shows how mature he is.

"

Of course, Elliott is coming off last season’s championship in the then-Nationwide/now-Xfinity Series. While he has yet to win a race in his title defense season thus far in 2015, he’s riding consistency to strong finishes and remains knee-deep in the standings battle.

Perhaps all Elliott needed to do at Richmond was not give in to the pressure, to simply relax and let the race come to him—instead of him forcing the issue because so many people are expecting so much success from him.

But let’s keep things in perspective: Elliott is not in the Sprint Cup Series this year. He’s not eligible for the championship. Heck, he’s not even eligible to earn points.

So why not let this season be a learning process, a feeling-out exercise, if you will. He’s getting great experience by racing not only against some of the sport’s greatest drivers, they’re also the same drivers he’ll go head-to-head against next season. Additionally, he has three of the sports' biggest stars to observe in his HMS teammates Gordon, Jimmie Johnson and Dale Earnhardt Jr. 

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Elliott trying to get his game going upward so that when things really begin to count at next year’s Daytona 500, he will be able to show he’s up for the challenge—even though he’ll still be several months away from being able to take his first legal drink of alcohol (in November 2016, that is).

Elliott’s next Cup race—he’s expected to do about seven throughout the 2015 season—will be the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte a month from now.

That’s the longest and most grueling race of any on the Sprint Cup circuit.

And it will be yet another milestone that Elliott will achieve before he goes full-time in 2016. The more milestones he can go through early, the more advanced he’ll be when his racing starts to count in the Cup ranks.

“Fortunately we were able to run laps today, able to stay on the lead lap and battle really hard, especially towards the end of those long runs, and to race with some good cars,” Elliott said. “I think that’s something our team should be proud of.

“… We’ll try to get better and hopefully try to have a better effort at Charlotte.”

With how he raced at Richmond and the progress he made, we know that he'll have learned a lot by then. Don't be surprised to see Elliott pull off a top-10, maybe even a top-five at Charlotte.

Quotes obtained firsthand.

Follow me on Twitter @JerryBonkowski