Career prospects loom large in playoff bid for Chase Briscoe

Chase Briscoe working hard to make the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs in 2024 means Chase Briscoe working hard to keep his dream career alive.

 “I don’t have anything to fall back on. I’m not like some of the other people, where they have family business or something like that. And with a two-and-a-half year old and a wife and then twins on the way, I definitely can’t afford to be left out and not have anything,” Briscoe said.

Like others at Stewart-Haas Racing, Briscoe became a free agent when the organization announced its closure last month.

As a working-class driver who had little money to solely fund his career off of, let alone live off of, for many years before he made it to the Cup Series, this situation has played out before.

Briscoe has been lucky. When he needed sponsorship to secure his Xfinity Series ride in 2020, a chance encounter with an executive at HighPoint.com led to him punching his golden ticket to a dream season. Nine wins and a Championship Four appearance ultimately parlayed into a full-time Cup ride with HighPoint.com support in 2021.

Three years later, in a time when Briscoe says his back is up against the wall again, he says he has “a great enough relationship” with HighPoint.com and Mahindra Tractors.

They just want him to find a team.

“[Mahindra] made it pretty clear that they don’t want to be the main topic of discussion. They want a team to hire me because of me. And not because of who I can bring,” Briscoe said. “Even from their side, they felt like it was better for them when they do go back and try to sell it to the higher ups. If a team comes to me and says, ‘Hey, we want Chase for Chase and not because of Mahindra Tractors or HighPoint.com,’ it was easier for them to internally sell it as well.”

Dollars and sense have prepared Briscoe for this situation. His dream 2020 season came four years after winning the ARCA Menards Series championship with Cunningham Motorsports. As Jeff Gluck reported in The Athletic, Cunningham Motorsports gave him an opportunity to test their car pre-season when he had all but left his dreams behind in Charlotte.

When Brad Keselowski Racing was shutting down in 2017, Briscoe showed championship-caliber speed and won with them.

When Briscoe had a disastrous season with the ill-fated No. 60 Roush Ford in 2018, he won at the Charlotte Roval with SHR which helped solidify his future.

At SHR, Briscoe has seen the highs and lows and been a part of each.

In 2022, he won at Phoenix in the spring and just missed out on returning there as a driver in the Championship Four.

Last year, he had a rough season, notoriously highlighted by a historic penalty after the Coca-Cola 600.

But this year, he has rebounded very well.

While his teammates haven’t stayed consistently inside the top-20 in points, Chase Briscoe climbed as high as 12th in points. In doing so, he has had many weeks where has been higher in points than Ford teammate Joey Logano and toe-to-toe with Chris Buescher.

Logano, whose organization has won the last two Cup titles. Buescher, whose organization has been on a major upswing.

Like the air around Stewart-Haas Racing, though, things have changed recently. Briscoe finished 21st at Kansas, fifth at Darlington and 25th at Charlotte, the week before SHR announced their closure. In the two weeks since that, he finished 17th at Gateway and 34th at Sonoma.

Sonoma was a double-whammy DNF. Briscoe was in a wreck that destroyed the rear end of his car. Then, with 37 laps to go, his transmission failed.

Before Kansas, he was 12th in points, 11 points to the good for a playoff spot. After Sonoma, he sits 17th in points, 27 points out.

“I feel like every week at this level you have to perform week in and week out. You can’t have a couple bad weeks because it’s like the stock market. One week you’re the hottest guy in the sport and three weeks from now you could have three bad weeks in a row and everybody thinks you’re washed up and can’t drive anymore, so you’re always auditioning,” Briscoe said.

And auditioning is hard when the stage is set for chaos.

“We have to get the train back on the tracks and start performing. And that’s the hard thing, I think, at least with our group internally at SHR. The other guys aren’t really in a playoff position. We’re still racing to make it into the playoffs, where the other guys have to win a race right now. So we just have to have every i dotted and t crossed. And that’s where with all the chaos going on behind the scenes has made it a little hard,” Briscoe said.

Now, the NASCAR Cup Series is headed back to the Heartland. Briscoe hopes he can end his heartache there at a track near and dear to his heart.

“Every week we typically have meet-and-greets with sponsors and there’s always the question of ‘what’s your favorite racetrack?’ I would always say, ‘Well, we don’t go there in the Cup Series, but it’s Iowa Speedway.’ And now we finally get to to there in the Cup Series. I’m super excited,” Briscoe said.

Briscoe is the most recent NASCAR winner at Iowa Speedway. He won a NASCAR Xfinity Series race there in July 2019.

Since then, the track has been partially repaved on the lower grooves in the turns.

“It is going to be a totally different racetrack now going there with the repave. But I think it’s still going to have some of those same Iowa characteristics. But certainly, I was pretty bummed that they repaved it, knowing my past history there and the love that I have for that place and that racetrack has always really suited my driving style for whatever reason. So I’m super excited to go and looking forward to it,” Briscoe said.

Driver-focused tracks have been Briscoe’s strong suit this season and the sites of four of his top-10 finishes. He finished fifth at Darlington, ninth at Phoenix, 10th at Martinsville and sixth at a very treacherous Texas Motor Speedway.

After Iowa comes a few more driver-focused tracks. There’s New Hampshire Motor Speedway, Chicago Street Course, Richmond Raceway and Darlington Raceway. In between those races is Daytona where Ford has shown speed.

No matter how it all turns out, Chase is Chase. But his team is all-in for success.

“I  told our guys when all of this went down, I said, ‘Look, at the end of the day we can pout and whine about it, but the circumstances aren’t gonna change and all that we can do is control what we can control. And I can assure you guys that if we’re winning races and running up front, it’s gonna be way easier for us to find a job than the guys that aren’t winning races and running up front,'” Chase Briscoe recalled.

As committed as he is to ensuring he has a future in NASCAR beyond 2024, he wants to ensure his crew members do too.

“The reality of it is, we’re never gonna be the same group we are now anywhere else. No team is gonna take the entire group from top to bottom and fire who they have now. I’ve just been telling all of my guys, ‘Look, anything I can do for you guys from a recommendation standpoint or anything, I’ll go to bat.’ I know for a fact that they’re one of the best groups in the garage, so it’s a shame that we’re getting taken apart. But that’s how life is and I’m gonna do everything I can though for those guys and try to find them the best opportunity I can,” Briscoe said.