AVONDALE, AZ – Chase Briscoe, driver of the No. 14 Mahindra Tractors Ford Mustang for Stewart-Haas Racing (SHR), returns to Phoenix Raceway for the final race of the 2023 season. Phoenix is the site of Briscoe’s first Cup Series win, earned in the March 2022 event, which was the first at Phoenix in the NextGen car. Since then, the 28-year-old driver has finished no worse than seventh at the 1-mile oval.
Briscoe heads to Phoenix with momentum for a strong finish to the season. Last weekend at Martinsville (Va.) Speedway, he started third and finished fourth to earn his fourth consecutive top-10 at the paperclip-shaped half-mile track. Briscoe’s fourth-place result was his best at Martinsville and his second-straight top-five there. It was also his first top-five since the April 23 race at Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway.
Briscoe summed up the 2023 season for the No. 14 team.
“This year has been really trying for the No. 14 team,” said Briscoe. “We had some really low moments and we’ve come back from that. I think we’re a lot stronger for it and, even if the results don’t show it, we are on the right track to finding the success that’s expected of us. There is still a long way to go. Everyone in this sport is always pushing and looking for new ways to find speed. We have to keep working to match that and eventually get ahead. It’s a never-ending fight to get better and we’ll keep working until we’re back to running up front every week and getting wins.”
In just his third full-time Cup Series season, Briscoe reunited with crew chief Richard Boswell midway through the season and earned his second-career pole at Daytona (Fla.) International Speedway in August. The duo went on to earn four top-10 finishes and the aforementioned top-five at Martinsville to add to Briscoe’s season total of four top-fives and eight top-10s.
Briscoe has four career NASCAR Xfinity Series starts at Phoenix and each resulted in top-10 finishes. 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 Truck Series top-10.
Phoenix is a great opportunity for the team to finish the season on a high note.
“Yeah, that confidence will always be a little greater when we head to Phoenix,” added Briscoe. “We’ve done well there, and we know what we need to do to be up front. There are still so many things that have to go right, but we have to keep ourselves in a position to have that opportunity to do well. If you look at last week at Martinsville, we were up front to start the race and we slipped back a little, but if we hadn’t fought to stay in the top-10, there was no way we’d come out with our best finish. We know we can run up front, we just can’t do anything to take ourselves out of that.”
