Chase Briscoe is killing it. Since early May, Briscoe, not Denny Hamlin, not Kyle Larson or anybody else you care to name, has been the best driver in NASCAR.
Over that period, Briscoe has dominated the Old Guy Sport competition index, which measures competitiveness on all tracks except superspeedways (Atlanta, Daytona, Talladega) because you can’t measure competitiveness on those tracks.
Avoiding the big wreck and being at the right place at the right time on the last lap determines who wins and how you finish at those places.
Meanwhile Briscoe, in his first year in an elite car, has pushed everybody else aside including his teammates at Joe Gibbs Racing. Nobody expected this, and Gibbs, in fact, was criticized for picking Briscoe out of the rubble of Stewart-Haas Racing when that organization finally collapsed last year and he needed somebody to replace Martin Truex.
But Gibbs has been vindicated. Briscoe started to muscle his way to the top after the race at Kansas, where he finished fourth. Expectations for him were high all along because he was driving for one of the two best teams in NASCAR, but until that race he was struggling driving a car that could do things he never dreamed of doing with Stewart-Haas.
“Kansas was like the light switch,” James Small, Briscoe’s crew chief, commented on NASCAR’s website after last week’s win at Darlington. That victory made Briscoe the first driver to advance to the round of 12 in the playoffs.
“I really think that’s when things started coming together and him understanding it,” Small said. “I think just within the team, with Chase himself and everything, I think it was the final stage at Kansas,” Small said.
According to the OGS competition index, ever since then Briscoe has been running away from everybody else. Counting Kansas, Briscoe has two wins, three seconds, one third, one fourth and one fifth over the 14 race period and has led laps under green in four other races, meaning he has been blanked in only two.
That totals up to a whooping 343 points on the OGS competition index, far more than anybody else except maybe Shane van Gisbergen, who has 295. But van Gisbergen got all of his points with four straight road course wins. He has yet to score a single point on an oval. Hamlin, with 254 points, almost one hundred fewer than Briscoe, is third and William Byron, with 187, is fourth.
That it took Briscoe a while to settle in is understandable. Briscoe has always known what he had to do to win in a race car, he just never had a car capable of doing it until he got to Gibbs. So it took him a while to realize things were different now.
Briscoe is a guy who has always had to prove himself, beginning when he was a youngster and his dad didn’t really want him to race. The climb has been long and hard and mostly in inferior equipment, which kept the pressure on as Briscoe tried to stand out from the crowd.
But it’s made him mentally tough. Nothing was given to him. “I don’t know, I’ve always just loved being in high pressure situations,” Briscoe said. “I feel like I just perform better for whatever reason.
“I feel like my whole career has been a high pressure situation. There was no backup plan. You might only get one race, you’ve got to go perform, show your worth,” he continued. “I’ve always felt like every week I’m still auditioning to prove I belong here.”
“We went through a whole process of who’s going to replace Martin (Truex),” Gibbs remarked. “The way we do things at our race team, it’s everybody sitting around, all of our management group, and we go through a lot of discussions; who would fit best, who matches up with our sponsor.
“And certainly we felt like Chase matched up well with Bass Pro Shops,” Gibbs said. “It’s a big process. It’s very important because that’s a quarter of our race team. We got a lot of people depending on that.
“It becomes critical, those decisions, because we all know you’re not going anywhere unless you’re got a really, really good crew chief and a really, really good pit crew and a really, really good driver,” Gibbs said.
And Briscoe, as he has proven over the last few months, is a really, really good driver.
NASCAR NOTES
Three most likely winners at St. Louis: 1-Denny Hamlin, 2-Chase Briscoe, 3-Kyle Larson. Last year’s winner at St. Louis: Austin Cindric. Top five at St. Louis last year: 1-Cindric, 2-Hamlin, 3-Brad Keselowski, 4-Tyler Reddick, 5-Joey Logano.
Last week’s Darlington picks: 1-Hamlin, 2-Larson, 3-Ryan Blaney. Darlington winner: Briscoe. OGS sport season record after 22 races: 10-11, no pick in Pocono race.
OGS competition index top 10 after 22 races: 1-Hamlin 472, 2-Briscoe 403, 3-Larson 366, 4-William Byron 326, Christopher Bell 326, 6-Shane van Gisbergen 295, 7-Blaney 293, 8-Bubba Wallace 161, 9-Alex Bowman 158, 10-Chase Elliott 148.
OGS competition index top 10 on intermediate tracks (tracks most similar to St. Louis): 1-Hamlin 261, 2-Briscoe 232, 3-Larson 229, 4-Byron 186, 5-Blaney 119, 6-Wallace 118, 7-Ross Chastain 102, 8-Logano 79, 9-Reddick 73, 10-Bell 71.