Chase Briscoe could choose to believe that making the Cup Series final four in his first season with Joe Gibbs Racing was akin to playing with house money but he left Phoenix Raceway on Sunday far more disappointed than he imagined.
“I mean, it was definitely a good first year, right,” said Briscoe on Tuesday ahead of the NASCAR Awards Show. “I texted our group chat and told them, ‘we have a lot to be proud of,’ because we gave the whole field a half season head start.”
Briscoe spent his first four seasons at the highest level with Stewart-Haas Racing but joined Joe Gibbs Racing in the off-season and replaced Martin Truex Jr. in the No. 19 car with crew chief James Small. There was an acclimation process but Briscoe ended up scoring three wins, the most poles and more points than anyone else during the playoffs.
“James and I sat down at the start of the year and he showed me all these goals, and I was like ‘man, I have only two career wins and you expect me to do this’ and we pretty much did all of them. He wanted 15 top-5s and to have led 800 laps.”
Check.
“He wanted four wins and we came up short on that one, but overall, like everything he thought we were capable of in our first year, we pretty much did it,” said Briscoe.
So why the disappointment?
In hindsight, Briscoe seemed to have speed equal to the dominant Denny Hamlin, his teammate, but an early practice flat tire, and then a subpar qualifying effort, and then another flat tire during the race seemed to perpetually set them back.
And yet, Briscoe kept driving through the field, and his pit crew kept gaining him a significant number of spots throughout the day.
Briscoe can’t help but wonder ‘what it’ when it comes to that race.
“It’s hard to swallow in a sense,” Briscoe said. “Like, as the days go on, it gets even tougher because it would be different if we ran 15th all day. But I feel like we were capable of winning and just didn’t get to show it with all the issues.
“We went from the back to the front like two or three different times.”
Briscoe is ‘still kicking myself’ for not telling Small to take two scuff tires like Kyle Larson and crew chief Cliff Daniels did to win the race. Instead, Briscoe told Small ‘to trust your gut’ and that turned out to be four qualifying scuffs.
“I would personally rather be on offense, and I just wish that he would have obviously not let me talk him out of it,” Briscoe added. “Who knows? You never know. It’s the question mark of what would have happened.
“So that’s the only thing that, I guess, is kind of burning me up is the tire issues we had and that I wish I would have let James trust his gut.”
But again, this year in the big picture, exceeded expectations.
Coach Gibbs had reached out to Briscoe before Truex even retired and expressed interest in signing him if that was the decision the 2017 champion went.
“The goal was to at least win a race,” Briscoe said. “I don’t think they expected this for our first season. Like, Coach told me the day before we signed that he would let me know what Martin decided by 11 in the morning.
“Sure enough, he called me at 10:57 and his first words were ‘you better not screw this up.’ So I told Coach on the grid after the race I hope I didn’t screw it up.”
He said that with a laugh.
“Now the goal is to build on this and move the goalposts even higher next year and beyond.”
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