Chase Elliott outlined his three-point strategy to outlast William Byron for the regular season championship, but lamented that his #9 HMS team had already fallen short on one of them. As a result, he said 'the roads got tougher' to become the top-seeded driver.Before qualifying at Richmond Raceway, Elliott was interviewed by NASCAR analyst Bob Pockrass on his bid to clinch the regular season title. He trails his Hendrick Motorsports teammate, Byron, in the second spot and has only two rounds to make up lost ground.Reflecting upon the same, he shared his thoughts on the progress."Last week I said we need to do three things. We need to qualify good at Watkins Glen, we need to qualify good here, We need to not crash next week, so we've already not done one of the big things that I said we had to do. So the roads got tougher and I recognize that it's not impossible. It's certainly got got tough. We did that to ourselves but not impossible and we'll keep our heads down."Chase Elliott qualified among the frontrunners in fifth for Saturday's (August 16) Cook Out 400. However, his race began to sour when he was slapped with a penalty for vehicle interference on pit road after Stage 1 completion.To make matters worse, his day went to the gutter when he got caught up in a multi-car incident triggered by an incident between Chase Briscoe and Brad Keselowski, which sent him nose-first into the outside walls and ultimately out of contention. The incident marked his first DNF of the season and a significant setback in his fight with Byron.Chase Elliott reacts to his Richmond disasterFresh off his crash at Richmond Raceway, Chase Elliott tried to decode what went wrong in his race-ending crash. During a Stage 2 restart, Chase Briscoe suffered a rear bumper contact by Brad Keselowski and spun into oncoming traffic, which set-off a 12-car pileup. As Elliott tried to escape the melee, he was tagged around by an unaware Kyle Busch through Turn 4."I think Kyle (Busch) just didn't know that we were trying to squeeze by the wreck on the bottom. He was kind of angled back towards the bottom of the racetrack, and I was just coming through. It's just unfortunate. We had a good start to the race," Elliott said via Speedwaydigest.comChase Elliott's pit road penalty forced him behind the crashing cars on lap 198. Without the citation, the #9 driver would've had a top-10 restart after the Stage 1 break. Meanwhile, his teammates Kyle Larson, Alex Bowman, and William Byron were left unscathed at the front. Moreover, the DNF further widens the gap between him and Byron at the top of the standings.