HAMPTON, GA – The NASCAR Playoffs begin Sunday with the Atlanta 400 at Atlanta Motor Speedway in Hampton, Georgia. Chase Briscoe is a part of it for the second time in his four-year NASCAR Cup Series career. Briscoe qualified for this year’s playoffs by scoring the equivalent of a walk-off home run on Sunday night at Darlington (S.C.) Raceway when he won the Cook Out Southern 500.
Briscoe came into the race 144 points outside the top-16 cutoff to make the playoffs. His only shot to make the 16-driver playoff field was with a victory, and in Briscoe’s eighth career Darlington start, the 29-year-old from Mitchell, Indiana, delivered. After starting third, his best at Darlington, Briscoe was a top-five mainstay, leading four times for 29 laps, including the final 26 tours around the 1.366-mile oval after a daring three-wide pass for the lead on lap 342. And when a late-race caution bunched the field for a 16-lap dash to the finish, Briscoe fended off a hard-charging Kyle Busch, who was also in a must-win situation to make the playoffs, to take the victory by .361 of a second over Busch. It was Briscoe’s second career Cup Series win and ended a 93-race winless streak, as Briscoe scored his first Cup Series win in just his 40th career start on March 13, 2022 at Phoenix Raceway. For the final 10-race title run, Briscoe is 13th amongst the 16 playoff drivers.
“The mental side of Atlanta is, by far, the hardest thing we do all year long,” said Chase Briscoe. “It’s a mile shorter, so while it’s very, very easy to run wide open the whole time when you go to Daytona or Talladega, in Atlanta, your car is struggling just to get close to that. There’s a lot more to the team side of things at Atlanta as far as getting the balance of the car right, and it’s just a challenge for us mentally with how fast things happen and how quickly you have to process things.”
“I think it’s the most mentally draining racetrack on the schedule. Daytona and Talladega have always been mentally draining, but you go to Atlanta, and things happen four times the speed because you lose a mile with that racetrack,” he added. “It’s an interesting track because it races like a superspeedway but is still an intermediate. The corners didn’t change. The radius of the corners is still the same as we’ve always had, so it’s not like a Daytona or a Talladega, where your car goes around there wide-open super easily. You’re manhandling the car at all times, so Atlanta is a very challenging racetrack and, by far, the most mentally draining with just how much your brain is trying to process and listen to your spotter. Applying what your spotter says is hard because things happen so fast there. It’s a tough one, for sure.”
Briscoe’s Darlington win was a milestone for Stewart-Haas Racing as it was the organization’s 70th points-paying NASCAR Cup Series victory. It was the 104th overall win for the organization co-owned by NASCAR Hall of Famer Tony Stewart and Haas Automation founder Gene Haas. Stewart-Haas’ total win tally includes six non-points-paying Cup Series wins, 27 NASCAR Xfinity Series wins, and one ARCA Menards Series West win.
Atlanta Motor Speedway has been around since 1960, but the Atlanta track Briscoe and his NASCAR Cup Series brethren will compete on this Sunday is less than three years old. The 1.54-mile oval was reconfigured after the final race of the 2021 season. The banking was increased from 24 to 28 degrees, the track was narrowed from 55 feet wide to 40 feet wide, and it was all covered in fresh asphalt. The goal of the reconstruction was to recreate the kind of pack-style racing seen at the behemoth, 2.5-mile Daytona (Fla.) International Speedway and the even bigger 2.66-mile Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway. Drivers competed on the new layout for the first time in March 2022, and the Atlanta 400 will be the sixth Cup Series race on the revamped track.
Briscoe shared details of his race earlier this year in Atlanta. He was fast in qualifying and the race, running top-five with 21 laps to go. A crash left him on the 31st, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.
“Atlanta’s one of those races I wish I could have back. Our car was so good. We qualified well, we raced really, really well, and I was able to be extremely aggressive,” Briscoe said. “I feel like my car handled better than anybody in the field. So, yeah, that’s a race I wish I could have back because the end-of-the-day result certainly didn’t reflect how good we were that day. It was just one of those situations where we got four-wide going into the corner and there was really only room for three cars, and I ended up being on the wrong end of it. But I’m excited to go back there. It’s a place where I felt like we gave one away in a sense – maybe not gave one away, but we were going to be in the mix at the end, for sure, if we were still rolling. Hopefully, our car will be able to handle as well as it did there the first time, and if we can do that and be as aggressive as we were, I feel like it can be a good day for us.”
The Atlanta 400 will start Briscoe’s eighth NASCAR Cup Series at Atlanta. His first two starts came on the old configuration, where his best finish was 15th, earned in July 2021. Despite the new layout in 2022, Briscoe equaled that finish in the debut of “new Atlanta” in March, where the driver of the No. 14 Mahindra Compact Tractors Ford Mustang Dark Horse for Stewart-Haas Racing started from the pole and led five laps. Fifteenth remains his best career Cup Series result at Atlanta.
“Atlanta’s unique because it is a superspeedway, so it’s not as comfortable to be loose as I would be at a Charlotte- or Darlington-type racetrack where it’s easier to slip and slide around,” added Briscoe. “At Atlanta, you want your car to be as stuck and comfortable as possible because you have to be aggressive, make moves, and do the superspeedway-style blocks and maneuvers. That place is probably a little bit tougher. The encouraging thing for us is how well our car handled in the first race. Hopefully, that difference from the guys who didn’t have the handling will be a little bit bigger, and our car will be able to adjust to the hotter weather. If that happens, I definitely feel like we’ll be in the mix.”
Outside of the NASCAR Cup Series, Briscoe has four other Atlanta starts. He ran three NASCAR Xfinity Series races at the track, each on the old layout, and never finished outside the top 15. His best result was ninth in June 2020. He made a lone NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series start in Atlanta in March 2017 and finished 25th.
“Everything we can do to try and win more races and compete for a championship,” said Briscoe. “We want to go out with our heads held high. I’ve been in this same position with Brad Keselowski Racing (in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series) where we were going to shut down at the end of the year, and we were able to go and win the last race of the season, and I think that put a stamp on things. It’s cool to say, with all the circumstances you were in with all the chaos and everything, people trying to find another place to go, that they were still willing to put the work in and the effort to bring race-winning cars. Winning again would be pretty special, and that’s what we will try to do.”
