There were, quite honestly, questions about whether Chase Briscoe could cut it. He was making the jump from Stewart-Haas to Joe Gibbs Racing, one of the two premier Cup teams in NASCAR, and for Briscoe, it wasn’t really a jump. It was a giant leap.
Not that Briscoe lacked talent. In 2021, he dominated NASCAR’s Xfinity Series, a stepping stone to Cup, with nine wins, most ever by a Ford driver and second only to Sam Ard’s 10 victories in 1983, the modern record. So he could drive.
But Briscoe hit Stewart-Haas in 2022 while he was on the way up and they were on the way down; he was a bright young star driving for a burned out team.
Stewart-Haas became a rudderless ship, drifting aimlessly in the NASCAR Cup Series until it finally hit a rocky shoal where if floundered and sank in 2024.
Briscoe, though, managed to stay afloat. He won two races over the three-year period he was at Stewart-Haas including Darlington’s iconic Southern 500 in 2024, the last race a Stewart-Haas car would ever win.
Then, with everybody at Stewart-Haas scrambling and looking for ways to save their careers, Briscoe caught a break. Martin Truex, one of the stabilizing forces on Gibbs’ team, retired after the 2024 season and Gibbs needed somebody to replace him.
Gibbs, a former Super Bowl-winning coach with the now Washington Commanders, then the Redskins, has always believed that how a person fits into a group is just as important as what he brings to it.
And he passed on some more experienced, more seasoned candidates in favor of Briscoe because he liked the way Briscoe fit, the way he approached racing and what he brought to the table in that regard.
“If you look at Chase, if you look at his background, he’s paid a huge price to be able to get here,” Gibbs said as reported by NASCAR.com. “If you look at the years he spent sleeping on people’s couches and everything it shows you again what a hard climb it is to get to the Cup level. He just deserves so much credit,” Gibbs commented.
Still, this would not be an easy transition, as Briscoe quickly found out. “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever gone through in my career,” Briscoe said on NASCAR.com after securing his first win for JGR at Pocono. “The only similarity, I would say, is being teammates with Kevin Harvick (at Stewart-Haas).
“But even when I was there, Kevin wasn’t really winning either,” Briscoe continued. “The expectation was always there with Kevin but it wasn’t necessarily guys winning week in and week out.
“At Stewart-Haas, it honestly felt like you shocked the world when you won,” Briscoe said. “Here, it doesn’t feel like that because they win a lot. It’s definitely been an adjustment for me. Even just racing with teammates that are winning has been an adjustment for me. It’s definitely been a big learning curve.
“It’s crazy now looking back on it, what I was racing against every single weekend,” Briscoe continued. “It’s mind-blowing how the cars drive, the preparation leading into the week. Nothing against SHR, but now, being inside the walls of JGR, it’s mind-blowing the level they compete at.”
Briscoe noticed the difference between Stewart-Haas and JGR in the first race of the year, The Clash, at Winston-Salem, N.C. “When we went to Bowman Gray (the track in Winston-Salem) I ran the first five laps of practice and I’m like ‘Holy smokes, this is unlike anything I’ve ever driven before,'” Briscoe said.
“It took me a long time, longer than I would have liked, I would say up until Charlotte qualifying I was always underdriving the car,” Briscoe commented. “I am so used to having to lift in certain spots because the car couldn’t take it.
“But the last month (after the Charlotte race) I feel like I finally have been getting used to what this car is capable of, how hard I can push it,” Briscoe said.
“It feels normal now, where at the beginning of the year it felt so foreign, how far I was able to drive it into the corner, how hard I could pick up the gas. Everything was the opposite of what I’ve been used to,” Briscoe added.
“From where he came from, there wasn’t much accountability,” James Small, Briscoe’s crew chief, explained. “Nobody was holding his feet to the fire. That’s probably been a big wake-up call for him.”
“I mean I read the internet,” Briscoe said. “People are like ‘Why would you put that guy in the car?’ Even when I won three poles in a row, not winning the race, people are trashing you,” he remarked.
“I knew we were more than capable, I knew myself that I was capable. But you never really know until you do it,” Briscoe declared. “It’s certainly nice to get that monkey off our back.”
Winning at Pocono showed Briscoe can get the job done, but he had already proven that at Stewart-Haas. What he has to understand is that at JGR, it’s assumed you’re going to win. The difference between Stewart-Haas and JGR is that it’s expected you’ll do it more than once.
NASCAR NOTES
Three most likely winners at Dover: 1-Denny Hamlin, 2-Chase Briscoe, 3-Kyle Larson. Last year’s winner at Dover: Hamlin. Top five at Dover last year: 1-Hamlin, 2-Larson, 3-Martin Truex, 4-Kyle Busch, 5-Chase Elliott.
Last week’s Old Guy Sport Sonoma picks: 1-Shane van Gisbergen, 2-Ty Gibbs, 3-Michael McDowell. Sonoma winner: van Gisbergen. OGS season record: 8-7.
OGS competition index top 10: 1-Hamlin 384 points, 2-Larson 302, 3-Christopher Bell 279, 4-William Byron 237, 5-van Gisbergen 224, 6-Briscoe 215, 7-Ryan Blaney 214, 8-Elliott 122, 9-Gibbs 112, 10-Ross Chastain 104.
OGS competition index top 10 on short tracks (tracks similar to Dover): 1-Hamlin 155, 2-Larson 115, 3-Bell 103, 4-Bubba Wallace 30, Gibbs 30; 6-Elliott 25, 7-Josh Berry 24, 8-Briscoe 20, 9-Blaney 15, 10-Joey Logano 12.
