Chase Elliott is about to be the last Chevrolet driver left chasing the NASCAR championship

The driver who already carries the hopes and dreams of the most NASCAR fans with him is about to be shouldering the chances of a whole manufacturer as well.

To say it hasn’t been a great NASCAR Cup Series for Chevrolet would be a mild understatement. Despite having more cars in the field week in and week out — Sunday at Talladega, there were 20 Chevys entered, or half the field — Chevrolet has managed to make it to Victory Lane just three times in 2018. One of those wins was when Austin Dillon won the Daytona 500, and the other two victories both belong to Chase Elliott.

While the first was huge because it was Elliott’s first ever Cup Series triumph, the second was more important in the grander scheme because it ensured that the man soon to be named NASCAR’s Most Popular Driver would be locked into the NASCAR Playoffs Round of 8. When that round arrives the Sunday before Halloween, he’ll also be pretty lonely, because he’s likely to be the only Chevrolet driver left.

Though five Chevys qualified for the playoff field, two (Dillon and Jimmie Johnson) fell away after the first cutoff. Two more are basically on life support: Alex Bowman is dead last headed to Kansas, a ridiculous 68 points below the cutoff line, while Kyle Larson is 26 points out of the eighth spot. Both drivers basically need to win to advance, and while that’s not impossible, neither has won this season, and Bowman has never won a Cup Series race. Put another way, the odds are definitely against it.

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The consensus is that for whatever reason, the Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 introduced to the Cup Series this year has taken teams more time than expected to get up to speed. It’s hard to point to any other reason that Johnson and Larson, who combined for seven wins in 2017, would be unable to score even a single victory during the current campaign.

Elliott and his team, for whatever reason, have been immune to this phenomenon, having their best year to date. There’s no reason to think that the 9 can’t make it all the way to the Championship 4, where it will be an underdog but at least have a puncher’s chance to win.

The same can’t be said for any other Chevrolet team, and there’s going to be a long offseason trying to figure out how to change things for the better. Driver changes will be one part of the process; already, Richard Childress Racing and JTG Daugherty Racing have opted for new talent in 2019, and Chip Ganassi Racing is rumored to be trying to swipe Kurt Busch away from Stewart-Haas Racing. A full year with the Camaro and a second offseason will also help, and maybe the incoming NASCAR rules package will help level the playing field as well.

In the meantime, assuming neither Bowman nor Larson wins their way into the next round, every Chevrolet team and owner will have to join Elliott’s legion of fans and pull for him to get all the way to Homestead. He’s the only chance left to salvage something from an otherwise miserable season, one that Chevy teams and fans alike will be trying to put in the rear view mirror as quickly as possible.