Chase Briscoe is now a third of the way through his fifth full-time NASCAR Cup season and, theoretically, he’s in a pretty good spot. He’s driving for Joe Gibbs Racing—yes, that Joe Gibbs Racing, the one with the factory-backed rocket ships—and yet, somehow, he’s still on a learning curve steeper than Talladega’s banking.
After four seasons at Stewart-Haas Racing, which included two wins and a whole lot of “we tried,” Briscoe made the leap to JGR this year when SHR shut its doors. On paper, that’s like trading in your used lawnmower for an F-22. In practice? It’s been a bit more like trying to fly the F-22 with the manual from the lawnmower still in your hands.
To be fair, the season started strong. Pole position and a fourth-place finish in the Daytona 500—that’s not bad. But since then, it’s been a bag of trail mix: some decent nuts (three more fourth-place finishes) and more than a few raisins (two DNFs and four races ending outside the top 20).
So, what were the expectations?
“I wanted just to win, truthfully,” Briscoe said Friday, which is refreshingly honest in an era where drivers usually say things like “grow the program” or “maximize opportunities.”
“The top-fives are great, right? I think I’m only one behind my career high, and we’re like 12 or 13 weeks in, so that’s encouraging. But I want to win races—that’s the main goal.”
Fair enough. But here’s the kicker:
“We’ve had the results, but I feel like we’ve been so bad,” he said. “I don’t even feel like we’re close to our potential.”
That’s not just honesty. That’s someone realizing they’ve been given a Stradivarius and are still learning to play “Smoke on the Water.”
Briscoe and crew chief James Small are still in the awkward honeymoon phase, apparently—figuring out how to communicate, tune the car, and not strangle each other on Sundays.
“We’re still learning each other so much, and I’m still learning the car,” Briscoe said. “So to be as competitive as we’ve been, for how bad we feel we are, is exciting. It’s just about putting it all together.”
His internal target? Charlotte. That’s the checkpoint where he hopes to feel like he’s finally in the right seat, heading the right direction, in a car that isn’t trying to kill him.
Of course, swapping teams is always a big deal, but moving to Joe Gibbs Racing comes with the added weight of expectation. You’re not just expected to show up. You’re expected to win. Repeatedly. Or at least look annoyed if you only finish third.
“It’s definitely different,” Briscoe said. “The expectation is so much higher at JGR. I told my dad—after Bristol, all four JGR cars were in the top eight. If that happened at SHR, we’d have been going nuts. At JGR, in the competition meeting, you’d think we all ran 30th. It’s just… different.”
And he’s not wrong. There’s a level of pressure at Gibbs that could turn carbon into diamonds. This is a team where anything less than excellence gets you side-eye from the engineers and maybe a quiet email from Coach Gibbs himself.
Then there’s the machinery. The JGR cars are so good they practically insult you if you don’t drive them fast enough.
“The cars have so much more potential than anything I’m used to,” Briscoe admitted. “A lot of the time in qualifying, I’m just underdriving. Mentally, I’m still lifting where I used to, and this car just… takes it. Qualifying better is going to make everything easier.”
You’d think qualifying was something Briscoe had figured out—he used to be pretty solid at it. But that’s the thing about switching to better gear: it raises the ceiling, and suddenly your old habits feel like wearing cleats on a ballroom floor.
Right now, he says, the biggest issue is starting mid-pack and spending the entire race clawing back to the front. Not ideal when you’re trying to collect stage points, lead laps, or not have your tires look like they’ve been through a woodchipper.
“I think we’ve literally had 17 stage points all year and we’re still 12th in the standings,” Briscoe said. “We’ve been getting the finishes, but not running up front all day. It all starts in qualifying.”
So yes, Chase Briscoe is still learning. But he’s got the tools, he’s got the ride, and he’s got the honesty to admit he’s not quite there yet. Which, in NASCAR, might be half the battle. The other half, of course, is just figuring out how to hold it wide open and trust the car won’t betray you.
Greg is the author of "The Nuts and Bolts of NASCAR: The Definitive Viewers' Guide to Big-Time Stock Car Auto Racing" and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, a Masters degree in psychology and is currently a PhD candidate majoring in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek.