Why Chase Returned to the Snowball Derby

The reigning Cup Series champion will make his first Super Late Model start in five years.

By Matt Weaver, ShortTrackScene.com

When Chase Elliott made a surprise appearance at the Southern Super Series race at Five Flags Speedway on July 31, his mind was already made up.

He wanted to enter the Snowball Derby.

By that point, it was just a matter of putting the pieces together, a complicated endeavor given his status as a NASCAR Cup Series driver these days.

For one, Elliott would need a car, because he hadn’t owned a Super Late Model in nearly five years. Since then, he has said it was his preference to only come back if he could reunite with longtime crew chief Ricky Turner, who engineered his previous victories in the event.

So, Elliott made a trip to the Florida Gulf Coast to assess his options.

“I had been thinking about doing it before that, and to be honest, that was really the reason I came down,” Elliott told Short Track Scene on Tuesday night. “We’ve been talking about it, and I wanted to come and watch the racing, number one anyway.

“But knowing it might happen this year, I wanted to watch a race and see what I could learn.”

Read the full story at ShortTrackScene.com.