JOLIET, Ill. — Managing expectations is something relatively new for Chase Briscoe. Even before Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race at the rejuvenated Chicagoland Speedway, he spoke about how his three-victory season last year — his first with Joe Gibbs Racing — had made him conditioned to winning, a luxury he hasn’t had for big swaths of his journeyman NASCAR career.
Going winless through the first half of this season “has really burned me up,” he said Saturday, on the eve of Sunday’s first Cup Series go here in seven years. That feeling was new, too.
So it says something about the 31-year-old driver’s expectations when the celebration he unleashed Sunday night at Chicagoland was premeditated, something he’d thought of springing on spectators last season in a nod to his outdoorsman roots and his Bass Pro Shops sponsor. After a smoky frontstretch burnout, he stood on the roof of his No. 19 Toyota, cast an imaginary fishing rod and reeled in this triumph.
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As far as Cup Series victories go for Chase Briscoe, this one was a lunker, scratching the win column and providing a boost — both in points and morale — back toward the Chase postseason. He called driving a patriotic paint scheme to victory on July 4th weekend “the most American I’ll ever feel in my life,” but in the context of the season as a whole, the moment provided a statement about his championship bona fides and his capabilities after an uncharacteristically slow start to the 2026 campaign.
“There’s been a couple that have kind of slipped away I feel like this year,” Briscoe said. “Then when your teammates are winning, it makes it worse as a competitor, because you know they have every equal opportunity that you have, and they’re performing better. So, yeah, there’s definitely a lot of pressure to go and run good. It goes in ups and flows.”
There was plenty of special to spread around in this latest up. Crew chief James Small was all smiles, savoring a moment when his No. 19 team’s potential was realized. A rocky start to the year with crashes or mechanical breakages in three of the first four races had left Briscoe and Co. 33rd in the early Cup Series standings. Sunday marked a 25-spot rise in the 15 races since.
Small’s role was crucial, and when he opted to bring Briscoe to pit road before fellow contender William Byron for his final green-flag stop, that move helped the team leapfrog an especially strong No. 24 Chevrolet, providing him an advantage that he’d keep to the end. He also spurred his driver on with pep and encouragement on the No. 19 radio, even with Christopher Bell — an equally hungry JGR teammate — chasing him down the stretch.
“We’ve had pace all year, it’s just been very yo-yo,” Small said from the side of the Victory Lane stage. “We’ve had incidents or mechanical failures, and we just needed clean races, and that has been the key since Pocono — just trying to have clean races, execute, put ourselves in position to win and just try to accumulate the points. And we knew if we could keep our car up front all night, we’d always have a chance, and tonight proved that.”
Helping sweeten the celebration, Sunday was Small’s 43rd birthday, and he marked it with a win for the first time. “This is a world’s first, and also the birthday of America, my first one as a U.S. citizen,” the Australian-born Small said, “so it’s been a great weekend.”
The moment was also a cherished one for Lee Cunningham, the No. 19’s veteran rear-tire changer and an Illinois native hailing from the township of Leaf River (population 432), some 80 miles northwest of the track. Cunningham motioned toward the Turn 1 side of the main grandstands to show where he sat as a teenager for Chicagoland’s first Cup Series race in 2001. In the years since he joined the NASCAR grind, he’s been on crews that have won multiple times here — including one where he caught some slime shrapnel from a Nickelodeon-themed Victory Lane for one of Martin Truex Jr.’s wins here nearly a decade ago.
As the team’s last pit stop approached Sunday, Cunningham admitted to some anxiety in the anticipation of their final service. The veteran presence, though, came through. The No. 19 crew members were careful not to tip their hands to other teams about their strategy, waiting until the last possible moment to position themselves on the pit wall.
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The longing that Briscoe had for a return to winning ways? Cunningham says it was shared among the steady over-the-wall group.
“I mean, no matter how many races you win, you always want to win another one, right” Cunningham said, “and to win it with this group of guys, we’ve had a new guy come into the picture the last couple years, and it always seems to take us a little while to jell, so it’s kind of nice to get the win today, and now we get to look forward to the playoffs. We’re on a roll, we’re climbing in points. There for a while, we were way back in points, so as a team it just really kind of solidifies … like, we knew what we were capable of, but it kind of shows everybody else now.”
Sunday showed Briscoe that the path to a potential first Cup Series championship is a difficult-but-viable one, a journey that would be made more feasible if the wins were to accumulate. Toyota mates Denny Hamlin and Tyler Reddick still hold a significant advantage in the standings with seven races remaining before the 16-driver Chase field is locked, but the points premium on winning in this year’s new-look format provides an avenue.
A day before Sunday’s 400-miler, Briscoe hinted that he might have to channel his inner Tony Stewart, referencing both his former employer and a NASCAR Hall of Famer who famously went on an all-timer postseason tear to score his third Cup championship in 2011.
“I definitely think it’s it’s possible,” Briscoe said in Saturday’s preliminaries. “It’s not going to be easy. You’re going to have to go win races, but yeah, I think we’re more than capable of doing that.”
Sunday night, with a soundtrack of Chicago blues blaring in Victory Lane’s background, Briscoe showed he can still reel it in.