PHOENIX, AZ – The NASCAR Cup Series heads to the final race in the three-leg West Coast swing Sunday at Phoenix Raceway. The United Rentals Work United 500 is the fourth points-paying race of the season and marks Chase Briscoe’s fifth start at Phoenix.
A year ago this weekend, on March 13, 2022, Briscoe captured his first career Cup Series win. He started sixth on the desert mile oval, led three times for 101 laps, and drove away from Tyler Reddick, Ross Chastain, and nine-time Phoenix winner and SHR teammate Kevin Harvick during a green-white-checkered shootout to score the first win for the No. 14 team since Clint Bowyer’s 2018 win at Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn. When he returned for last November’s season finale, the 28-year-old from Mitchell, Indiana, started third and finished fourth after leading 11 laps.
Briscoe says changes to the short track rules package will make for better racing at Phoenix this weekend.
“I think any time you can have less downforce, it’s going to bring the cars closer together and create a better race,” said Briscoe. “The tires wear out and you start slipping and sliding around. It just makes it more competitive. There’s good and bad to that. It means as a team we have to be on it if we want to have a chance at a win but, if you can hit your setup right and keep track of position, then it just adds that much more exciting. I don’t know that we can take much from last year because of the changes that have been made, so we’ll have to see what happens when we get on track for practice.”
Briscoe became the 200th Cup Series winner and the first driver to take a car carrying the No. 14 to victory lane at Phoenix. He also joined Alan Kulwicki (1988) and Bobby Hamilton (1996) as the third driver to earn his first Cup Series win at Phoenix.
Briscoe ended last season with a top-five at Phoenix and had strong runs at Martinsville and Richmond, two tracks less than a mile in length. He believes he will continue to find success on the shorter tracks
“For sure. I was never really a great short-track racer, but this NextGen car just fits my driving style better. We found something at Phoenix that translated well to those other tracks,” said Briscoe. “Even after all of the things we tried throughout the season, we saw that we could show up at Richmond, Martinsville, and Phoenix and run up front. I hope that’s the case, still, and we can have a shot at going back to back at Phoenix. That win means so much – that’s one moment from last year I wish I could revisit. I would love to do it again.”
In four career NASCAR Xfinity Series starts at Phoenix, Briscoe has never finished outside of the top 10. His best is sixth, scored twice – March 2019 and 2020. He also made one NASCAR Truck Series appearance there in November 2017, when he started eighth and finished fourth in his Ford F-150, securing his 13th career top-10 in that series.
Mahindra Tractors adorned the No. 14 Ford Mustang when Briscoe took the win last March and again for his top-five in the season finale. After starting this season with finishes of 35th, 20th, and 28th at Daytona (Fla.) International Speedway, Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, California, and Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Phoenix is just the place where the No. 14 team can turn things around, particularly with the debut of a new NASCAR rules package for short tracks and road courses.
