TALLADEGA, Ala. — The memories pop up on Chase Briscoe’s screen from time to time. As Briscoe seeks to reach the Cup championship race for the first time, those reminders, often via Facebook Memories, take him back to a time when he didn’t know he would have a career in NASCAR, let alone contend for a series title.
“Like 10 years ago, I was sleeping on a couch,” Briscoe said, noting the early days of his stock-car racing career in Charlotte, North Carolina. “Look, at the end of the day, I know that I’m probably not going to go back to sleeping on a couch, but I feel like I’m still trying to prove that I belong here and still trying to prove my worth.”
Don’t misunderstand Briscoe, who starts second in today’s playoff race at Talladega Superspeedway. He had confidence in his abilities but motorsports is filled with confident drivers who never got the chance — or never got the right chance.
“I always felt like I was capable of doing it at this level and hopefully being a champion,” Briscoe said in response to a question from NBC Sports, “but you never know until you get the right opportunity. This year, the one thing for me has been just trying to prove that I belong.”
In his first season at Joe Gibbs Racing, Briscoe is among the drivers still in contention to reach the Nov. 2 championship race at Phoenix.
Briscoe has been in the Round of 8 once before but that was with Stewart-Haas Racing in 2022 and he admits going beyond that round would have been challenging. He enters Sunday’s race at Talladega (2 p.m. ET on NBC and Peacock) holding the final transfer spot for the title race. Briscoe has a 15-point lead on William Byron, the regular season champion with two races before the title race.
Briscoe’s rise caught some by surprise — and is something he remembers. He only had one Cup win when Joe Gibbs Racing announced June 25, 2024, that it had signed him to take over for Martin Truex Jr., who was retiring from full-time competition after that season.
“I like reading social media and whenever it got announced that I was going to the 19 (at Joe Gibbs Racing), there was a ton of question marks,” Briscoe said. “I think for me just trying to prove to everybody that ‘Hey, I belong here’ and still try to carry that chip on my shoulder.”
Briscoe has shown he belongs in these playoffs. He has finished in the top 10 in six of the first seven playoff races. Only teammate Christopher Bell can match that in this postseason. Briscoe has the best average finish in the playoffs at 6.3 (Bell is next at 7.4).
But Talladega presents a unique challenge for Briscoe. He’s never won in a drafting style race in Cup, Xfinity, Trucks and ARCA.
“It’s definitely been a struggle for me,” Briscoe said of superspeedway racing. “I’ve run up front and finished up front in quite a few of them, but I’ve never been able to win on a superspeedway at any level, whether it’s ARCA, Trucks, Xfinity, that’s kind of the one thing still left for me to do I feel like as far as styles of race tracks. That’s something that I’ve definitely tried to work on.
“I feel like I went in waves, where at the start of my career I was really patient and just trying to wait for the wrecks to happen and you would still run OK if you missed the wreck. Then I went through kind of a phase where I was just the most aggressive and (took) every run and then I kind of morphed into kind of a hybrid of both of those.
“I’ve yet to find something that actually has, I guess, the result of winning. But I have been up front in a lot of the races. I think for me the biggest thing is just still trying to understand how to control the race and do it late in the race.
“I’ve been able to kind of control the race for a large majority of the stages and even at the end until 10-15 to go and I’ve been shuffled out a couple of times. Just trying to have a better understanding of what I need to do at the end of these races, whether that is be more aggressive with some of my moves or managing my gap more.I feel like that’s the one thing I can do a lot better at the end of these races.”
A win would send him to the championship race in two weeks and provide another special memory.
