Chase Elliott was apologetic after wrecking out Josh Berry early into the Enjoy Illinois 300 at World Wide Technology Raceway. The Hendrick Motorsports driver shared that he felt 'terrible' about the incident and hoped Berry and his team knew it wasn't intentional.Berry began Sunday's race six spots ahead of Elliott and was running in 15th when the incident happened. On lap 36, Berry was trying to get underneath Joey Logano when Elliott dive-bombed into his inside and nudged his left rear quarter panel.The contact sent Berry spinning into the outside walls over Turn 1, leaving his left front tires destroyed. He limped back to the pits and retired to a dead last placing. This is the second straight DNF for the playoff driver, as well as the second at the 1.25-mile track.Meanwhile, Elliott rounded out the podium places and came away with 38 valuable points. During a post-race interview, he expressed regret over his contact with Berry, saying (X/Bob Pockrass),"Yeah, first off, just you know, apologies to Josh and the 21 team. I, yeah, had no intentions of crashing him. Obviously, so I that sucks. I've known Eddie and Lynn forever and I've known Josh for a long time too. So I hope they know that wasn't intentional, at least, you know, so I feel terrible about that, felt bad about it. You know, right after it happened. So just, yeah, that was unfortunate,"Chase Elliott now ranks ninth in the playoff standings, while Berry sits dead last with 45 points below the cutoff. The Wood Brothers Racing driver absolved Elliott of any wrongdoing and simply called it 'wrong place, wrong time.' Denny Hamlin won the race and topped the tables as well."It just felt good": Chase Elliott on his race at WWTRAfter a mid-pack finish in the playoff opener at Darlington, Chase Elliott seemed relieved to notch up a top-5 at Gateway. The result marked his first top-5 after coming in third at Sonoma eight rounds back.Reflecting upon the same, Elliott said (via Speedway Digest)"It felt good to just have a solid day for this No. 9 NAPA Chevrolet team. I thought we were really good at times; certainly more competitive than we've been in a minute. It was a lot of fun to be up in the mix. We just needed a little bit more there at the end, but we were way, way better than we've been here lately, so that's nice."Chase Elliott has endured a stretch of poor results ever since the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Nonetheless, he has been the fastest Hendrick driver so far in the playoffs.Elliott finished 17th last week, two spots ahead of Kyle Larson and four ahead of William Byron. The No. 9 driver still has a long way to go to recover lost ground, for Larson and Byron both rank ahead in the playoff standings.