KANSAS – The AdventHealth 400 Sunday at Kansas Speedway in Kansas City will be Chase Briscoe’s seventh career NASCAR Cup Series start at the 1.5-mile oval. While Briscoe is still looking for his first top-10 finish at Kansas, he has been quietly consistent, with four finishes among the top 20 and only one result outside the top-25. Briscoe’s best Cup Series finish at Kansas is 13th, earned in September 2022.
Briscoe’s Kansas record in the NASCAR Xfinity Series was a study in improvement – specifically, rapid progress. After finishing 30th in his first Xfinity Series race at Kansas in October 2018, Briscoe returned to the track the following October and finished an impressive third after leading twice for 33 laps. He finished 14th in July 2020 but then roared back three months later to utterly dominate. In his final Xfinity Series start at Kansas in October 2020, Briscoe led four times for a race-high 159 laps – all but 41 of the race’s 200 laps. He finished 1.199 seconds ahead of runner-up Daniel Hemric to take the last of his 11 Xfinity Series victories.
While Texas Motor Speedway isn’t an exact copy of Kansas, it’s still an intermediate-style oval.
“Texas is a very unique mile-and-a-half in that you’re way slower in one end than you are in the other,” said Briscoe. “Kansas is also a very unique mile-and-a-half just because it’s very high-speed. I would say it probably has the fastest corner speed of any mile-and-a-half we go to. So if your stuff was OK in (turns) three and four at Texas, I’d say it maybe correlates a little bit to Kansas. Kansas is just so fast and smooth. There are no bumps, no anything, so it’s kind of a weird racetrack. We don’t really go anywhere that’s like Kansas. Our mile-and-a-half stuff’s been pretty good this year. I don’t know if we’re going to have race-win
Briscoe has made two NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series starts in Kansas. He finished fifth in his first Truck Series race at the track in May 2017 and, returning to Kansas four years later, finished 19th (May 2021).
Briscoe’s epic run to the 2016 ARCA Menards Series title ended with a mic drop at Kansas. Having already sewn up the series title before the last race of the year at Kansas, Briscoe went into the series finale and made that race a microcosm of his season. He won the pole, led twice for a race-high 67 laps (all but 33 of the race’s 100 laps), and then won the race with a 1.464-second advantage over runner-up Austin Cindric. It was Briscoe’s sixth win of the season, and he padded his championship tally to an eye-popping 5,290 points, 535 points more than his nearest pursuer, Tom Hessert III. Briscoe’s average start across 20 races in that title-winning season was 4.1, and his average finish was 5.2 with a total of 949 laps led.
The new Ford Mustang Dark Horse has been an improvement compared to the previous generation Mustang, and will its updated aerodynamics and will help at Kansas.
“The Ford Mustang Dark Horse is 100 percent better, at least for us,” added Briscoe. “I can’t speak for every Ford driver, but for us on the 14, it is 100 percent better. We have more performance and the aero balance is just way more together. The front and back of the car work together a lot more. In traffic, it’s way better. Everything about it has been way better for us. It is weird how it seems some of the Ford teams don’t feel the same, but for us, last year we were so far off that anything was going to feel like an improvement. I feel like Kansas is a place where we can go and run well.”
The Kansas layout looks simple, but is that simplicity is a bit deceptive when it comes to turning consistently fast laps.
“Kansas is fairly simple. Out of all the mile-and-a-halves that we go to, I would say in some ways it’s probably the least technical, but in other ways it’s one of the more technical tracks, just because it seems like for whatever reason, especially the last couple of years, Kansas has become a track where everybody runs on the fence,” said Briscoe. “So it’s really, really hard to pass there. Your car does have to be really balanced there just to be able to pass anybody and not get tight behind guys. Any time you run the fence, there’s a technical aspect to it, but at the same time, it’s so high-speed, it’s not like we’re in there doing a lot of stuff with the pedals, but there’s a lot of commitment that comes with that as far as understanding the downforce and where you put your car compared to others. And the other thing that’s really hard about Kansas is just the wind. It seems like that racetrack, more than anywhere we go, your car drives totally different on one end than the other just because of the direction of the wind and how windy it is when we’re there.”
Kansas is another track where Briscoe had success in the Xfinity Series. In fact, he ended his career in the series there with a win.
“We just had really good stuff, truthfully,” added Briscoe. “I think anybody could’ve driven that thing to win when we won there in the playoffs. I don’t know how many laps we led, but it felt like we led every single one of them. Our stuff was just extremely good, and that’s what it takes at Kansas. It’s one of those places where you’re only going to go as fast as your car allows. It’s a place where the driver, out of all the mile-and-a-halves, probably makes the least amount of difference just because it is so fast. (Kevin) Harvick said all the time, ‘You can’t make a slow car go fast,’ and that’s the truth when you go to Kansas. If your car’s not nearly perfect, it’s going to be a long day for you. So, hopefully, we can take what we’ve learned this year and apply it to Kansas. I feel like at Texas our car was 85 percent, 90 percent close to being perfect, so I feel like we’re right on that window of finding what perfect is, as close as you can be to that. You’re never 100 percent, but you can get to 98, 99 percent, and if we can do that, then we can go to Kansas and run well.”
In the ARCA race in 2016, Briscoe won the pole, led 67 of 100 laps, won the race, and that was during a dominating ARCA season.
“It was huge,” Briscoe added. “ARCA finished their season at Kansas when I was racing there, and we were able to wrap up the championship before even going to Kansas that year. When you already have won the championship, you want to go out winning the race, right? We went in there, sat on the pole and won the race. It was cool. I knew when I ran that race it was probably going to be the last ARCA race I would ever run, so you want to go out on top. But also, I didn’t have anything for sure going into 2017. I was obviously talking to a couple of Truck teams, and when I won that race, that was finally when Ford came and said, ‘Hey, we want you to drive next year for us.’ So it was a big deal to win there and I think about it every time I go back, even though it was eight or so years ago now. That’s kind of where it all started, in a sense. After that weekend was when I finally signed my Ford contract, so it’s always cool to go back.”
Briscoe, crew chief Richard Boswell and the entire No. 14 team have been steadily chipping away at the points and rising up the leaderboard. Briscoe explains some of the things he and the team are doing to make improvements.
“It’s a lot of little things,” said Briscoe. “I’d say the biggest thing is we’ve just tried to be way more consistent with what we bring to the racetrack. In the past, not that we would do a total 180 every week, but I felt like we never really built on anything. We were always like, ‘This looks way better, let’s go do this.’ The next week, it was ‘This looks way better, let’s go do this.’ We just didn’t have a lot of consistency in what our cars were doing. Over the offseason, Boswell and I kind of talked – in the Xfinity Series, that’s kind of the same approach we had that first year, where I’d run a (Kevin) Harvick setup one week and a Cole (Custer) setup another week. And going into 2020, we were just, ‘Let’s just build a setup and let you figure out how it drives and kind of chip away at it little by little.’ That’s kind of the approach we went into this year with, let’s just go back to last season and look at the few racetracks we ran well at, what were the similarities, and let’s just build on that and try to get the same type of driving racecar every week. That’s been big for us. I feel like unloading the car off the truck for practice, I know what the car should do every week. In qualifying, we’ve been good because we can kind of fine tune it and we can learn from it week in and week out. I feel like I’ve done more studying this year than ever before, and a lot of that just goes to having teammates who want to kind of do it with me. Noah (Gragson) and I sit down every Tuesday for an hour and a half. It’s me, Noah, Drew (Blickensderfer, No. 10 crew chief) and Boswell, and we just go through video and talk through things, and I’ve just been way more prepared every week when I go to the racetrack. It’s a lot of little things, but I’d just say trying to be more consistent is the biggest thing.”
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