Chase Elliott Is Out With A Broken Leg. Josh Berry Is In. What Now?
There will be a drop-off, based on the history of replacement drivers. But how steep?
The NASCAR world was stunned Friday evening, when news arrived that 2020 Cup Series champion Chase Elliott suffered a snowboarding accident that would cause him to miss this week’s race in Las Vegas. As Hendrick Motorsports clarified further on Saturday, Elliott had surgery for a fractured left tibia; there is currently no timetable for his return to the track.
The loss is a huge blow for both Hendrick and the sport as a whole — Elliott is the five-time reigning Most Popular Driver, after all. Now the pressure is on 32-year-old replacement driver Josh Berry, who will climb into the seat of the NAPA No. 9 for at least this weekend’s race, if not much longer. On the one hand, this is a big opportunity to drive a championship-contending car; on the other hand, Elliott’s shoes are going to be incredibly difficult to fill. So what might we expect Berry to do in his new ride?
The Tennessee native comes to Hendrick from Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s Xfinity Series team, where he’s won five races over the past two-plus seasons. According to the press conference in which Berry was officially introduced as Elliott’s replacement, Berry was selected for the role due to a number of factors — including Earnhardt’s relationship with Rick Hendrick, Berry’s driving style and even his similar physical build to Elliott. After finishing fourth in the Xfinity standings last season, there’s no question Berry is a competent fill-in driver.
The expectations could get paralyzing, however, if Berry isn’t careful. “It’s a hard situation to step into,” said fellow Cup Series driver Alex Bowman, who would know more than most. In 2016, the then-23-year-old Bowman was tabbed with replacing Earnhardt while he recovered from a concussion. He ended up holding his own, with 3 Top 10s, an average finish of 19.7 and a Pts+ of 95 — just 5% fewer adjusted points per race than an average driver — during his 10-race stint in the No. 88 Nationwide Insurance car.
But Bowman was no Earnhardt, at least not at that stage of his career. His Pts+ was 58 points worse than Dale Jr.’s during that season — underscoring that, on a team with championship aspirations, a near-average performance isn’t good enough.
Berry will face the same comparisons. Elliott has a 171 Pts+ since the start of the 2022 season, and was statistically the best in the sport last year according to driver rating, even if he did lose in the playoff finale. So how steep might the fall from Elliott to Berry be? For clues to the answer, I looked at situations in the Cup Series since 1972 where multiple drivers had at least 10 races for the same team in the same car number, and one driver’s first race of the season was the race after the other driver’s last race. (This was my best approximation of a search for replacement drivers in the middle of a season.)
Here were those 17 instances, along with their Pts+ and their Start- and Finish- (average start and finish, indexed where the Cup Series average is 100 and lower is better) relative to those of the car’s regular driver:
Historically, the differences with a new driver have varied widely depending on the situation. On average, though, there was a predictable (if somewhat slight) downturn with someone different piloting the car: Replacements were roughly 10 points worse in Pts+, 6 points worse in Start- and 5 points worse in Finish-.
That kind of drop-off would likely suit Hendrick just fine — shave 10 units of Pts+ off of Elliott’s average since the start of 2022, and the resulting 161 mark would be as good as Kyle Larson or Christopher Bell were last year. But our list includes an eclectic mix of contending teams and backmarkers, the former of which (again, unsurprisingly) found it harder to maintain a high standard of performance with a backup in the car. Among those teams on the list where the regular driver had a Pts+ of at least 100, the replacement saw his Pts+ come in 28 points lower.
A 28-point decline from Elliott’s usual Pts+ wouldn’t be the end of the world, either. Even a Bowman-style 58-point dip would leave Berry above the Cup Series average. (It would also hover around Bowman’s mark of 114 from last season, coincidentally enough.) But is Berry good enough to pull that off? Will he even be Hendrick’s semi-permanent solution for the entirety of Elliott’s absence? Only time will reveal those answers.
“It is a good opportunity for Josh to learn,” Bowman told reporters Saturday. “To see how Hendrick Motorsports operates and the things we do, to be part of an organization like that, even though it’s through a situation that nobody wants.”
“I think it’s something you can grow as a racecar driver from, and learn, and show everybody what you’ve got.”
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