Chase Elliott was chosen as the 2020 NASCAR Cup Series Most Popular Driver in polling conducted by the NASCAR Motorsports Press Association on NASCAR.com. Elliott’s election was announced Wednesday night during an awards show on the NBC Sports Network that replaced the annual Cup Series Awards banquet because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Y’all are the best fans in #NASCAR,” Elliott [@ChaseElliott] tweeted upon being announced as the 2020 winner.
The 2020 honor was the third-straight for Elliott, who also is the 2020 Cup Series champion. He has won the fan-voted award yearly since the retirement of former Most Popular Driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. at the end of the 2017 season.
Elliott also became the first series champion to win Most Popular driver in the same year as the Cup Series title since his father, NASCAR Hall of Famer Bill Elliott, in 1988.
The elder Elliott holds the record for most Cup Series Most Popular Driver Awards with 16 between 1984 and 2002. Earnhardt, meanwhile, holds the distinction of winning the award the most consecutive years — 15 between 2003 and 2017.
Chase Elliott’s championship 2020 season included five race wins, among those the final two races of the season at Martinsville Speedway and Phoenix Raceway. He also won both road course races this season at the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval and Daytona International Speedway road course to extend his string of consecutive road-course wins to four.
