POCONO, PA. – This weekend’s NASCAR Cup Series doubleheader at Pocono (Pa.) Raceway is a hometown race for primary sponsor HighPoint.com. The doubleheader will begin at 3 p.m. EDT on Saturday, June 26, and 3:30 p.m. EDT on Sunday, June 27.
“I would love to go out and have a good showing for HighPoint.com. It was really cool to get that win last year at their home track,” said Chase Briscoe. “They’ve been a big part of my career here at SHR, coming on last year so I could run the full season and then coming over to the 14 to go Cup racing. They’re still pretty new to the sport and it’s been cool to have that support as I get settled into the Cup side of things. If we can go follow up what we did last week and keep things moving forward, it would be a great way to say thank you for everything they’ve done.”
HighPoint.com will share the home stage spotlight with Cisco as they celebrate the debut of the latest generation of Webex by Cisco. The two will share paint on the No. 14 Ford Mustang at Pocono honoring a longstanding partnership between the two companies.
Technology is so important to everything we do, but it definitely played a larger role in my move to the 14 than I expected it to,” Briscoe added. “With everything that we’ve dealt with over the last year, virtual meetings became a larger part of preparation for races and, when it came time for Johnny (Klausmeier, crew chief) and I to start working together, that’s how we connected. There are so many different aspects of racing where technology comes into play and, thankfully, we have great partners like HighPoint.com and Cisco to make sure we’re getting the most out of virtual meetings or our simulator time, whatever we need to be ready to go for the next race.”
The Pocono doubleheader follows one of the more impressive runs of the season for the No. 14 team after what looked to be a potential top-five finish in last weekend’s Inaugural Ally 400 at Nashville (Tenn.) Speedway.
Chase Briscoe ran solidly in the top-15 before the team made a call to gain track position, placing him in the lead on lap 177. Briscoe led five laps and was on track for a new career-best finish before a brake issue took him out of contention with less than 75 laps to go.
Briscoe will have a chance to score his first Cup Series win on Saturday and Sunday, but he already has one Sunday win at Pocono after overcoming a mountain of adversity to be the first to cross the finish line in last year’s NASCAR Xfinity Series race at the Tricky Triangle. The Mitchell, Indiana, native overcame a pit-road speeding penalty, a near-miss in a multicar accident, and a late-race spin while leading to notch a total of 24 laps led en route to his fourth win of 2020 and the first home-track win for HighPoint.com.
And that wasn’t Briscoe’s first time visiting Pocono’s victory lane. On July 29, 2016, Briscoe won the ARCA Racing Series event to cap a string of four consecutive victories. He led all but nine of the race’s 60 laps in a dominating performance that was emblematic of his season. Briscoe drove to two more victories that year to take the ARCA championship by an impressive 535 points.
“Pocono is such a challenging track. Speed is important anywhere we go, but this is a place where you have to be able to adapt,” said Briscoe. “Your car may be really good in one corner and maybe not so great in the other two, but you’ve got to be able to figure it out if you want to run up front. I’m excited for the doubleheader. I really enjoyed running them last year in the Xfinity Series and we were usually able to find something in that first race that we could carry over to the second day, so it’ll be nice to have two shots at showing the work the guys have been putting in.”
In his three Pocono starts outside of the Xfinity Series, Briscoe finished among the top-10 every time. He finished 10th in the June 2016 ARCA race and ninth in the 2017 NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race.
Briscoe sits 26th in the driver championship after 17 races and leads the Rookie of the Year standings by 94 points over Anthony Alfredo.
