NASCAR insider reacts to Alan Gustafson making race-winning pit call for Chase Elliott at Kansas

While Chase Elliott had to drive it like he stole it on the last restart, Alan Gustafson won the race for the No. 9 team on Sunday. The two-tire call on the final restart before overtime was exactly what Elliott needed. Now, he’s advancing in the NASCAR Playoffs.

Chase Elliott used his tire advantage over the other cars to steal the race on Sunday. When Denny Hamlin and Bubba Wallace started to get into one another coming out of Turn 4, Elliott was on the bottom with rubber, speed, and grip to get the win.

While Alan Gustafson has had his fair share of critics, the blame has many times unfairly been applied to him for shortcomings lately. Sometimes, pit strategy doesn’t work out. That’s not always on the crew chief.

Jeff Gluck of The Athletic is making sure people hear the truth. Gustafson made the right call and Elliott executed on it.

“I think too, like, I know Chase Elliott fans, are going to be like … they were in my mentions, they were so ready to pounce on Alan Gustafson when he took four tires again today,” Gluck said on The Teardown. “It didn’t look like it was going to work out, you know, because they got an immediate caution sort of again, and it was like, ‘Man, now he doesn’t have enough laps to get up there with his fresh tires.’ And I asked both Alan and Chase about it afterwards, and they were like, ‘Yeah, that’s what we thought.’ But Chase said that once he got his tires kind of cleaned off the last lap of the race, he felt he had an advantage on the four tires.

“Alan Gustafson, folks, makes the right pit call by taking four tires. He was the first off pit road with four, and he said afterwards, ‘I did that because I knew we weren’t as good as the drivers ahead of us and I needed to have an advantage to give ourselves a shot.’ He said he and Jeff Gordon both said they didn’t think Chase was going to win with the call, but they were trying to give themselves the best chance. That’s what he did, and they won.”

Chase Elliott had to make the right moves on the track. Without those four tires on the last pit stop he can’t make those moves. The top seven cars all took two tires out of that final pit stop. So, Elliott and Gustafson had to do something different.

As Michael Waltrip loves to say, you gotta go where they’re not. That applied on the track and on pit road. Chase Elliott took the bottom groove. He dipped under Hamlin and Wallace. Gustafson and the pit crew stepped up, too. The 9 car was the first off pit road with four tires.

We have seen these calls fall short time and again recently. This time, it paid off in a big way.