Chase Briscoe stood on the roof of his No. 19 Toyota at Chicagoland Speedway, cast an imaginary fishing line into the crowd, and reeled in a season he had spent six months trying to keep from sinking. He had planned the celebration a year earlier, a nod to his sponsor Bass Pro Shops and the outdoorsman life he grew up with in Mitchell, Indiana. He just never got the right moment to use it, until Sunday night.
“There’s been a couple that have kind of slipped away, I feel like, this year,” Briscoe said. “Then when your teammates are winning, it makes it worse as a competitor. You know they have every equal opportunity that you have, and they’re performing better. So yeah, there’s definitely a lot of pressure to go and run good. It goes in ups and flows.”
Thirty-Third in the Standings, and Burning Over It
Crashes and mechanical failures wrecked three of Briscoe’s first four races this year, leaving him and crew chief James Small mired in 33rd place in the Cup Series standings before the season had barely started. Briscoe, who won three times last year in his first season with Joe Gibbs Racing, had grown used to winning. Going without felt foreign, and he said the drought “has really burned me up.”
Fifteen races later, at Chicagoland, on a weekend built around a patriotic paint scheme for the Fourth of July, Briscoe held off fellow Gibbs driver Christopher Bell by 0.276 seconds for his first win of the season and the sixth of his career. He called driving that flag-themed car to victory on the holiday weekend “the most American I’ll ever feel in my life.” The finish also marked a 25-spot rise up the standings in the fifteen races that followed that miserable start, proof of a team that had quietly rebuilt itself while nobody outside the garage was paying attention.
The turnaround, Small said, came down to something unglamorous: staying out of trouble. “We’ve had pace all year, it’s just been very yo-yo,” the crew chief said. “We’ve had incidents or mechanical failures, and we just needed clean races. That has been the key from Pocono onward. Just trying to have clean races, execute, put ourselves in position to win, and just try to accumulate the points. We knew if we could keep our car up front all night, we’d always have a chance, and tonight proved that.”
A Birthday, a Citizenship, and a Well-Timed Pit Call
Small’s read of the closing laps turned out to be the difference. When the race’s final cycle of green-flag pit stops arrived with 53 laps to go, Small chose to bring Briscoe down pit road ahead of William Byron, a call that let the No. 19 team leapfrog a strong Hendrick Motorsports car and hold that track position to the finish. Small spent the closing laps talking Briscoe through the run over the radio, even with Bell closing fast behind him.
The win landed on a personal date for Small too. Sunday was his 43rd birthday, and the Australian-born crew chief called it his first win as a naturalized United States citizen. “This is a world’s first, and also the birthday of America, my first one as a U.S. citizen,” Small said from the side of the Victory Lane stage. “So it’s been a great weekend.”
Lee Cunningham, the No. 19’s veteran rear-tire changer, felt the moment differently. Cunningham grew up in Leaf River, Illinois, a town of 432 people roughly 80 miles from the track, and he pointed toward the Turn 1 grandstands where he sat as a teenager watching Chicagoland’s first Cup Series race in 2001. He has worked crews that won here before, including a Nickelodeon-themed Victory Lane celebration for Martin Truex Jr. nearly a decade ago that left him covered in green slime. Before Sunday’s final stop, Cunningham admitted to some nerves as the team stayed quiet on the pit wall, careful not to tip its strategy to any other crew watching.
“No matter how many races you win, you always want to win another one,” Cunningham said. “To win it with this group of guys. We’ve had a new guy join the crew the last couple of years, and it always seems to take us a little while to jell. So it’s kind of nice to get the win today, and now we get to look forward to the playoffs. We’re on a roll, we’re climbing in points. There for a while we were way back in points, so as a team it just really kind of shows what we knew we were capable of all along.”
Toyota’s Front-Row Party, and the Math That Still Favors Hamlin
Seven Toyota drivers finished in the top ten at Chicagoland, a new record for the manufacturer and a reminder of how deep the Gibbs and Toyota stable runs this year. Denny Hamlin finished third behind Briscoe and Bell, and Hamlin and teammate Tyler Reddick still hold a wide advantage over Briscoe in the points with seven races left before the 16-driver playoff field locks in. Reddick’s own night ended in frustration when he ran over a piece of debris from another car on lap 131, wrecking his radiator and sending him behind the wall for repairs, the fourth time in five races that misfortune has struck the points leader.
For Briscoe, the win reopens a door that had looked shut for months. A day before the race, he brought up Tony Stewart’s name unprompted, the Hall of Famer he used to work for, who caught fire in the 2011 playoffs to win his third championship almost entirely off the strength of a hot postseason run.
“I definitely think it’s possible,” Briscoe said Saturday. “It’s not going to be easy. You’re going to have to go win races. But yeah, I think we’re more than capable of doing that.”
A Career Built on Second Chances
Briscoe’s road to Joe Gibbs Racing was never a straight line. He spent years grinding through Xfinity and Truck Series rides before landing a full-time Cup seat with Stewart-Haas Racing, then watched that organization close its doors at the end of last year, sending him to Gibbs as a free agent with no guarantee the move would work out. It did, immediately: three wins in his first season with the new team turned him into a driver expected to contend every week, a different kind of pressure than the one he carried as a journeyman looking for any ride at all.
That history is part of why this year’s slow start cut so deep. A driver who had just proven he belonged among the sport’s contenders spent four races watching his own high standard turn against him, compounded by teammates who kept winning while his own results fell apart. Briscoe never stopped saying the speed was there. Sunday at Chicagoland finally gave him a result that matched the words.
What One Win Changes
A single victory rarely rewrites a season. But for a driver who spent half the year defending a 33rd-place hole he never expected to be in, Sunday did more than add a trophy to the shelf. It gave a team that had quietly climbed 25 spots in the standings public proof of what it already believed about itself, and it gave Briscoe a template: stay out of trouble, let Small work the strategy, and let the fishing rod celebration wait for the next one. With seven races left before the playoffs begin, Briscoe now has a version of the argument he needs to make to a locker room full of doubters, his own included.
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