AVONDALE, Ariz. — Chase Briscoe had reason to celebrate this week when penalties against his No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing team from the season-opening Daytona 500 were overturned on appeal, moving him from last place in the NASCAR Cup Series to a more respectable 15th.
After receiving such a rejuvenating boost, he treated himself. Just don’t tell his diet-conscious crew chief, James Small.
“James is gonna kill me, but I had a chocolate dessert,” Briscoe said, grinning as he noted that the sweet treat of choice was lava cake with ice cream.
The appeal ruling was the figurative and possibly literal icing on the top of an eventful Wednesday in the Cup Series standings as the field tunes up for this Sunday’s Shriners Children’s 500 (3:30 p.m. ET, FS1, MRN Radio and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) at Phoenix Raceway. Briscoe went from negative territory back onto the plus side after 100 points were restored to his season-long tally, and he’ll continue to build bonds with Small, whose four-race suspension was also reversed.
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On the other end of the penalty pendulum, Austin Cindric tumbled down the standings, docked 50 points with a $50,000 fine for initiating contact with Ty Dillon’s car during Stage 1 of last weekend’s Cup race at Circuit of The Americas. The Team Penske driver avoided a one-race suspension, a punishment that had been levied against other drivers in past incidents for similar hook-style bumps in retaliation. Competition officials indicated in the most recent episode of “Hauler Talk” that the altercations are considered on a case-by-case basis with multiple factors at play.
Cindric staggered from 11th to 35th in the Cup Series standings — a low perch that he said he’ll have to work hard to offset. He added that “it’s not up to me to decide what penalties are or aren’t” for those situations, admitting that his reaction was heated after his No. 2 Ford was forced into a run-off area on the Texas road course by Dillon’s No. 10 Kaulig Racing Chevrolet.
“I think I was faced with adversity,” Cindric said. “I’ve been faced with a lot of adversity to start the season and a lot of emotions, and obviously handled them poorly, and would think that given that situation again, I’d handle myself better.”
One person who anticipated Cindric to be sidelined for Sunday’s race was Dillon, who made a nod toward previous suspensions handed to Chase Elliott (2023, Charlotte) and Bubba Wallace (2022, Las Vegas) for similar crashes.
“I was expecting a one-race suspension. I’m glad they did something, though,” Dillon said. “I think 50 points and $50,000 is probably enough to make him think about doing something like that again. But I think a one-race suspension is what most of us expected. They set a standard a couple years ago.”
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While Cindric was dropping in the Cup Series pecking order after three races this season, Briscoe was on his way back up, saying, “Biggest points day of my career! We’re back!” in a social-media post. The 30-year-old driver in his first year with Joe Gibbs Racing enters this weekend with far less pressure at Phoenix, the site of his first Cup Series win in 2022.
“It’s crazy the amount of relief I felt, honestly, just I felt like a new man the rest of the week,” Briscoe said. “So yeah, it’s been nice. Not that our season was over, but it kind of felt that way to a certain extent. I mean, we could have still won a race, right, and made the playoffs, but you’re going to be at such a deficit the whole season. So yeah, I definitely feel like I got a new life in a sense, just because it stings when it’s the first race, and you’re kind of buried the whole season. But now I feel like I’m back on a level playing field.”
Briscoe said Wednesday’s hearing was his first time participating in the appeals process, and that his No. 19 team argued that an assembly defect — and not an unapproved modification — caused the spoiler of his pole-winning Daytona 500 car to be out of compliance. Side note: Briscoe shared the front row of the Cup Series season opener with Cindric, his former teammate as the two worked up through the Craftsman Truck Series ranks.
Briscoe said he appreciated the National Motorsports Appeals Panel took the time to hear and consider JGR’s case, and that he was an invested and interested observer in the process.
“You know, there could be no appeal at all, right, but at least we had the opportunity to go and present our case,” Briscoe said. “And I think that when you see it get overturned, typically the evidence is there, right? And for us, we brought 20-something-plus spoilers and spoiler bases in, and they all had all these different things that were messed up with them. So when you looked at the evidence, it was clear that it wasn’t an issue of something we did. It was literally just assembly, and there (were) issues with the building process of the spoilers themselves.
“So yeah, I definitely think that it was a surprise, I think to all of us, that it got completely thrown out just because you don’t normally see it, but when you looked at the evidence, I went in there not knowing anything. Like, I didn’t know what we really were in trouble for, so I felt like I was just as much on the appeals board as they were, and when I was watching the evidence at both sides, I was like, ‘man, how do we not win this? Like, it just is common sense.’ So, yeah, I was glad that, like I said, we had the opportunity to do it, and obviously glad that with the evidence that it was able to get overturned.”