"Had a lot of fun with that": When Chase Elliott picked an F1 superstar as his preferred celebrity to bring to a NASCAR race

In a 2018 interview, Chase Elliott revealed the name of the celebrity he'd be excited to host in a NASCAR race. Elliott, who has been a full-timer in the Cup garage since 2016, is one of the biggest names in the sport today.

Not only is the Hendrick Motorsports driver a Cup champion (2020), he has also won NASCAR's most popular driver award every year since 2018.

When asked by journalist Jeff Gluck in 2018 about the name of the celebrity he'd like to host in NASCAR, Chase Elliott named Formula 1 driver Daniel Ricciardo.

"I had a chance to hang out with Daniel Ricciardo from the F1 side (at Texas last fall). He’s not a celebrity — a California celebrity — but obviously a very well-known racer. Had a lot of fun with that," Elliott described.

"I think kind of keeping it in the racing community, hanging out with people that understand what you have going on is a lot more fun than hosting somebody that has no clue. I’m a fan of different things. But hosting other people within a type of racing, I think is very cool because they know a lot about racing," he added.

He claimed that once anyone from a different discipline of racing is invited to NASCAR, it becomes 'an easy cross' considering both, the guest, and the host might not be that familiar with each other's side of racing.

Chase Elliott deemed that as an easy thing to talk about because of the differences and the similarities.

When Chase Elliott opened up on his experience of watching an F1 race in 2017

In the fall of 2017, Chase Elliott took a trip to Europe where he attended the Belgian GP. The Formula 1 race, which is held at the iconic circuit of Spa, is considered by many as one of the must-have experiences for a race fan.

But Chase Elliott wasn't left very taken by what he saw on the track, even though the myth of the event was something he felt.

After coming back to his home country post his Europe trip, Elliott remarked that seeing how F1 operates was 'pretty neat', claiming that it is a 'different world' compared to what he knew. The HMS driver described (as per Autoweek):

"It was kind of funny to see how much of what they do is different and how much of what they do is the exact same. We (American racing) just have a little bit of a different way of getting to the final way of getting there."

He added that he got to see a couple of F1 racecars from up close, mentioning that it was 'pretty incredible', including the speeds those cars are capable of.

Having said that, Chase Elliott claimed that despite the high speeds, the cars don't get very close to each other on the track.