The paper deals with the theoretical and experimental evaluation of the performance of a CVT chain drive in steady state conditions. We propose an enhanced version of the CMM model, to accurately predict the slip behaviour and the traction performance of the variator. We show that to achieve this objective it is necessary to accurately describe the elastic displacements of the pulley. Indeed, this allows also to accurately predict the sliding velocities at the pin-pulley interface and, therefore, the total slip and the traction performance of the variator. A comparison between the theoretical predictions and the experimental measurements is also presented, which shows a good agreement between theory and experiments.