At Martinsville, two of the safest bets for Phoenix suddenly looked like extras in a Michael Bay movie. Chase Briscoe’s Toyota gave up at lap 296, Denny Hamlin’s followed on lap 334—both engines quitting without warning, drama, or mercy. Experiment, defect, or cosmic joke—either way, the timing couldn’t be worse.
Briscoe was the first to suffer the indignity. Everything was going smoothly; he was keeping pace with Kyle Larson, the laps ticking by uneventfully. Then, in a blink, the No. 19 Bass Pro Shops Toyota coughed, wheezed, and fell silent. It wasn’t a crash, a spin, or a wall scrape—it was just a sudden, complete mechanical surrender.
“No indication,” Briscoe said afterward, still sounding like a man trying to explain a ghost story. “I was just running around there. I felt really good about coming here and where we were at and racing with (Kyle) Larson there and went to upshift and something happened. I’m not really sure, it’s unfortunate. We’ll go on to next week and that won’t matter anyways.”
And he’s right—at least mathematically. Briscoe’s Championship 4 ticket was already punched. But even for a driver with nothing to lose, watching your car die in the middle of a race feels like having your phone brick itself halfway through an important call. The lights are on, but nobody’s home.
Then came Denny Hamlin.
Running second, stalking Ryan Blaney, Hamlin looked like a man in control—right until his Toyota suddenly lost power heading into Turn 1. Lap 334, and the No. 11 King’s Hawaiian Camry went from contender to casualty with all the subtlety of a light switch.
“I felt like the car was coming to us,” Hamlin said. “I felt like we were in a good spot there where we just started to close back in on (Ryan) Blaney. We got the track position we needed. I didn’t feel anything—it was running and then it was just no noises, no sounds, no indication. I decelerated into turn one and it just shut off. That was it.”
No smoke, no bang—just silence. The kind that makes a crew chief stare at a monitor in disbelief.
Hamlin admitted he was “obviously concerned” about Phoenix. “But there’s obviously nothing I can do about it,” he said. “We’ll live with it and hopefully we’ll get back next week. I’m confident in the speed that we’ll have next week. I’m really confident in what this team is going to bring next week and we’ll bring our best, hopefully it lasts.”
Whether it was a team experiment, a bad batch of parts, or just NASCAR’s version of fate having a laugh, both Briscoe and Hamlin will roll into Phoenix with a little extra anxiety—and maybe a few replacement engines blessed by every available priest and mechanic.
Because if Martinsville proved anything, it’s that sometimes, even when you’re locked into the final, your car just doesn’t feel like finishing the job.
Greg was a writer for DriveTribe supporting Amazon's The Grand Tour 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, and a Masters degree in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek and a regular contributor to Forbes.
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