MARTINSVILLE, VA – Chase Briscoe enters Sunday’s NOCO 400 at Martinsville (Va.) Speedway is fresh off his first top-five finish of the season. Briscoe finished fifth in the Food City Dirt Race at Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway last weekend to earn his fourth finish inside the top-15 in the last five races.
“I’m really excited about Martinsville,” said Chase Briscoe. “We definitely have a better grasp of what we need on short tracks than we had before the NextGen and we’ve done really well the last two years. We gambled a little in the fall Martinsville race trying to get into the championship race, but we had a really good car and that’s what allowed us to come out with the finish that we did.”
Briscoe’s best finishes this season have come on tracks 1 mile or less in length. He finished seventh on the mile oval at Phoenix Raceway on March 12 and 12th two weeks ago on the .75-mile oval at Richmond (Va.) Raceway. Though his most recent finish was on the Bristol half-mile oval, its concrete surface was covered for the lone dirt race on the NASCAR Cup Series schedule.
“I didn’t grow up doing this kind of racing, so I had a really hard time when it came to short tracks,” added Briscoe. “It’s a different kind of aggressive driving and you really have to have a car that can stick to the bottom and turn well to be able to do anything. I think the biggest thing I’ve had to learn, and I think it’s probably something I’ve just had to learn in general, but taking care of the tires is so important. It’s a long race, tempers get heated and, if you end up using everything up, you’re going to get run over or moved out of the way.”
In four Cup Series starts at Martinsville, Briscoe has two top-10 finishes. He placed ninth in both 2022 events at the .526-mile paperclip-shaped track, and was seventh in his last NASCAR Xfinity Series start there in October 2020. Briscoe also owns two NASCAR Truck Series starts at Martinsville with a best result of 11th from the eighth starting position in April 2017. He returned with the Truck Series that October to start on the pole and lead the first 39 laps before a late-race accident relegated him to a 19th-place finish.
HighPoint.com makes its second appearance of the season on the No. 14 Ford Mustang this weekend at Martinsville, the first coming at Atlanta Motor Speedway, where Briscoe finished 24th. This weekend will also mark HighPoint.com’s first time appearing as the primary sponsor on the No. 14 at Martinsville for a Cup Series event.
