Q: Talk a little bit about running Cup events in Atlanta, your home track where you’ve won five times in your career?
Elliott: I haven’t been as successful on the new configuration as I was on the old one. But Atlanta is still home. I still like to go there and run that racetrack. It’s always been a lot of fun.
But I think the Wood boys—Len and Eddie—it’s an ongoing deal. You’re tryin’ to build a better mousetrap, a better race team and it’s just hard to do. A single-car entity, I don’t know if it’s impossible, but it sure makes it tough.
Q: A lot of the smaller teams feel like they’re fighting an uphill battle, don’t they?
Elliott: Take Roush, for example. Roush has got his five [car] deal, and he’s got a piece of that 28 and 38 [the cars fielded by Yates Racing]. I mean, Ray Charles could see that. It just makes it tough.
There is so much information there, and there is so little time. As a single-car entity, you can only do so much. If you go out and even if you test all day—let’s say you make three runs an hour, and you make three 10- or 15-lap runs an hour with your changes, where you come in and make changes in between and then go back out and you run. In an eight-hour day, that’s 24 runs for a single-car entity. Well, you multiply that by four or five or six teams, they’ve got so much information on you just in one day that you can never catch up.
Q: Do you think that’s good for NASCAR, or do you think they’re going down a path they should go down?
Elliott: Well, it’s done set. It’s done gotten too far. And the point is, what are you gonna do about it now? There is going to be a select group of people—because this is a sport where you gotta have deep pockets. Even if you have multi-car teams, if you have one car or two that’s maybe lacking total sponsorship, and then you’ve got one or two more, maybe they can cover it—where you can subsidize and spread it out over the three, four, five, six teams. You look at the Ford deal, and there’s Roush’s deal along with Yates and then there is the 21 car. And that’s it.
Q: You really think you’ll be able to step out of the car for good at the end of this season? What if the Wood Brothers come knocking on your door again to maybe run a few more races for them again next season?
Elliott: At this point in time, I don’t know. I think I’m just going to look at the next few races and see if I can help ‘em out maybe, but it would just be a short-team deal. A few and that’s it.
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