Briscoe and NASCAR Cup boys going old school at Richmond
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RICHMOND, Va. − Mitchell's Chase Briscoe is ready to get back to short-track racing Sunday at Richmond Raceway, but he'd like to do it without the short end of the stick.
Finishes have not been fruitful for Briscoe and the No.14 Stewart-Haas Racing in recent weeks on the NASCAR Cup Series circuit, and the 27-year old driver from Lawrence County is beyond ready to turn things around Sunday in the Federated Auto Parts 400.
The race starts at 3 p.m., and will be 400 laps (70/160/170) for 300 miles over the .75-mile layout at one of NASCAR's oldest venues. It will be televised on USA Network, with MRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio handling the broadcast.
Briscoe placed 20th last weekend at Michigan in the Firekeepers Casino 400, while SHR teammate Kevin Harvick claimed his first victory of the season. It was great for the team, but put more pressure on Briscoe going toward the playoffs.
“Our Rush Truck Centers/Cummins Ford Mustang was really good to start the race," Briscoe said. "We were able to make some good gains but we were so tight. The guys did a great job working on it, but I got in the wall toward the end and didn’t help.
"We’re still in a good place, just got to get through the next few races and make sure we get to move on to the playoffs.”
Briscoe 15th place in points
Only three races remain in the regular season, which culminates at Daytona International Speedway on Aug. 27, when the 16-driver playoff field will be set. Briscoe sits 15th in the driver standings with one win and is poised to make the Cup Series playoffs for the first time, provided there are no more than 16 different race winners this season .
Harvick is the 15th different winner on the tour this year, so Briscoe is still in the playoff field, and he feels he could improve his standing Sunday.
“I think so," he said. "We’ve been really strong on the short tracks this year and SHR has done a great job getting the most we can out of these cars. So, yeah, I think we can have a really good day. The most important thing for us is to survive and have a good points day.
"We’re definitely in a better place than we were two or three weeks ago, but we can’t get too comfortable. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a lot of big wrecks at Richmond, but there was a time when it was really easy to get caught in someone else’s mess, so we have to stay on the lookout for that and do the best we can to be there at the end.”
Briscoe solving short tracks
Briscoe will be back in the No. 14 HighPoint.com Ford Mustang for his fourth NASCAR Cup Series start at the .75-mile oval and second of the 2022 season. His 11th-place finish in April was his best at the track in the Commonwealth’s capital city.
When this Cup Series season began with the Busch Light Clash at the L.A. Coliseum on Feb. 6, Briscoe was consistently one of the best on track through practice, qualifying and the first laps of the race.
The first points-paying race of the year at a track 1 mile or shorter came March 13 at Phoenix Raceway, a track that had seemed to have a stranglehold on Briscoe. However, he conquered Phoenix this time to earn his first Cup Series victory.
Since the win at Phoenix, Briscoe has finished no worse than 15th in six starts on tracks 1 mile or shorter, with the exception of his 22nd-place result April 17 on the dirt at Bristol Motor Speedway, when he led 59 laps but spun on the final lap while attempting a pass for the win. Last year, Briscoe’s best finish on the shorter tracks on the NASCAR schedule was a 13th-place result earned in the fall at Bristol.
In his five NASCAR Xfinity Series starts at Richmond, Briscoe earned his first top-10 in April 2019, then returned that September to earn a fifth-place result.
Richmond rising for Briscoe
Richmond hasn't always resided among Briscoe's favorite tracks, but he thinks he's closing the gap with the shorter tracks as evidenced by his win at Phoenix and the 11th-place run at Richmond in April.
“I’m not really sure," Briscoe said when asked what changed his fortune. "I just felt like we unloaded pretty close to what we needed, where in the past we were so off and I didn’t really know what I needed on a short track. But that was kind of what we saw at Phoenix, too.
"This car has changed a lot of things and it’s hard to really pinpoint what the change is. I think a lot of it is how the NextGen car drives, and it just seems to suit what we do on short tracks.”
Contact Times-Mail Sports Writer Jeff Bartlett at jeffb@tmnews.com, or on Twitter @jeffbtmnews.
This article originally appeared on The Times-Mail: Chase Briscoe and NASCAR Cup tour rolling into Richmond
