Chase Elliott talks about the Daniel Suarez incident and disagrees with NASCAR’s punishment of Bubba Wallace

After a weekend in Chicago that resulted in a hefty $50,000 fine for Bubba Wallace for slamming against the door of Alex Bowman in a cool down lap after the race, Chase Elliott was relieved not to find his own name on the disciplinary list, after a brief back and forth with Daniel Suárez.

After some unintentional altercations on the track, there was no intentional hard contact between the two, which may have spared Elliott a fine.

However, the driver of car number 9 was never particularly worried.

“I honestly didn’t really think about it because we barely had any contact,” Elliott said, according to FOX Sports’ Bob Pockrass“That was the only contact we had, at best. I haven’t studied Bubba’s situation in detail, but personally, I think I see it very differently based on what I’ve seen.”

Wallace crashed into Bowman, who was wiping his brow during the cool-down lap when a car door slammed into him. Even then, Elliott did not necessarily see enough to NASCAR fines Wallace $50,000.

“I don’t think he should have been fined. I understand that,” Chase Elliott said. “I understand that, but man, you get into a lot of detail with some things. Nobody was hurt and it was unfortunate, I guess, just the circumstances and Alex winning the race and stuff like that. But I didn’t think it was a big deal.”

As for his own back and forth with Suarez, neither driver seemed worse off. Suarez questioned NASCAR’s inconsistency in applying the code of conductbut even he said he didn’t think Elliott should have been fined for the incident.

The two fell victim to the dense field of participants and the wet weather conditions.

And while this ultimately resulted in frustrating contact for Elliott, it was not enough to result in penalties for a possible retaliation attempt by Elliott.

“He and I spoke after the race and I understood that it was definitely difficult conditions,” said Chase Elliott. “I obviously really enjoyed that, I mean, our day was like that, I ruined our day because I had so much trouble with the last set of rain tires. So at the end of the day, it’s nobody’s fault, it’s my own. That’s how I see these situations. I put us in a bad position.”

“It’s a shame that it happened in the last corner of the last lap and I lost a few places. But I really don’t think he wanted to turn me around. I had driven into him in the previous corner, the car with the number 6 (car of Brad Keselowski) kind of put us in a tight spot, and I expected him to jump down, but he didn’t. So we talked about all of that, and I think we both got it, and it was all good, really.”