After all the talk of Denny Hamlin as the favorite at the start of The Chase presented by Mobil 1, or the Kyle Larson Show that followed, the star of the recent moment has undoubtedly been Chase Briscoe.
Ever since taking over the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing car from Martin Truex Jr. in 2025, Briscoe has been rapidly building his reputation as one of the sport’s top drivers. He followed a trip to the Championship 4 last season with another strong campaign — a career-high Driver Rating of 95.2 –filled with steady improvement as the schedule rolled on. It all has culminated in the past few weeks: A near-win over Larson at Kansas (he led up until the final seven laps) and then back-to-back wins at Las Vegas and Charlotte, part of what is only the 18th postseason win streak by a Chase/Playoff driver since 2004:
The wins have earned Briscoe some well-deserved time in not only Victory Lane, but also the spotlight of The Chase.
He’s now up to fourth in the current standings, 65 points behind Larson as we enter the final four races on the schedule — Phoenix, Talladega, Martinsville and Homestead-Miami. That’s a big leap from where he sat coming out of the Bristol Night Race (ninth place) just a few weeks ago. The streak has even taken a lot of the attention away from Larson, whose dominance in The Chase was one of the defining early storylines as the schedule seemed to be creating a Larson-versus-Hamlin championship referendum at three consecutive 1.5-mile tracks this month.
But in a counter-intuitive kind of way, Briscoe crashing that party has been the best favor anyone could have done for Larson. By taking wins off the board that might have belonged to other, closer title challengers to the No. 5 team, Briscoe’s streak has, ironically, helped Larson’s championship odds just as much as it has added to his own.
We can see this if we compare the current output from my NASCAR Cup Series forecast simulation model — which lists Larson as a commanding 72.5% title favorite over Christopher Bell (10.6%), Hamlin (8.9%) and Briscoe (4.6%) — with a series of counterfactual scenarios in which someone else other than Briscoe won those races instead.
Specifically, we’ll look at the six drivers who sat between Larson at No. 1 and Briscoe at No. 8 in the standings after the Hollywood Casino 400 at Kansas Speedway: Denny Hamlin, Christopher Bell, Joey Logano, Ryan Blaney, Ty Gibbs and Tyler Reddick. What if any of those drivers, who ostensibly went into the past two races as greater threats to Larson than Briscoe, won one or both of the races at Las Vegas and Charlotte — what would Larson’s odds be then?
(Note that, for the purposes of this exercise, we’ll slot a given driver from that group in as the race-winner, and we’ll keep the rest of the running order behind them exactly the same sequentially. So this weekend, for instance, we might make Christopher Bell the winner of the photo-finish instead of Briscoe, which would render Briscoe second, Blaney third, and so forth. We’ll also only be changing the finishes, so stage points remain constant in each simulation.)
Here’s what those alternate-universe scenarios would look like in terms of the championship odds:
The main victims of Briscoe’s winning streak are clearly Bell and Hamlin, both of whom would actually have been outright favorites to win the title over Larson — despite Larson’s prior dominance and his solid finishes at Las Vegas and Charlotte — if either had rattled off consecutive wins over the past two races. Instead, Bell finished a costly 23rd in Vegas and had one of history’s closest runner-up finishes at Charlotte, while Denny followed up a 16th-place finish at Vegas with a fifth-place run at Charlotte.
Interestingly, if either of the two leading Penske contenders (Blaney or Logano) had the win streak instead, it wouldn’t have vaulted them to favorite status, though it would have eaten into Larson’s edge on the rest of the field compared with his current odds. And Reddick or Gibbs could have done the same thing as Briscoe and it would have had a similar effect, since neither has an especially great track fit over the remaining four races on the calendar.
In other words, outside of somebody truly low in The Chase’s pecking order — or simply not in The Chase at all — Briscoe was just about the best choice Larson could have asked for to rattle off those wins, keeping the likes of Bell and Hamlin out of the winner’s circle in the process.
Even if those two races were split between different contenders, Larson’s odds would have taken a hit. For instance, a Bell win at Vegas paired with Briscoe’s real-life win at Charlotte would drop Larson’s title odds by 21 percentage points relative to his current figure, and a Hamlin win at Charlotte would drop Larson’s odds by seven points even if it followed Briscoe’s real-life win at Vegas:
By winning back-to-back trophies, Briscoe ensured such a split could never happen. And at the same time, his own championship bid began this two-race stretch as just enough of a long-shot — even after piling up a whopping 143 points over the past two races, Briscoe still trails Larson by 65 points in total — that this recent surge has done little to threaten Larson’s position atop the championship odds.
This could change, though, if Briscoe keeps winning more races. If he extends the streak to 3 in a row this week at Phoenix, his title odds would rise to nearly 20% while Larson’s would drop by nearly 10 percentage points. Keep it rolling to 4 in a row at Talladega, and things really get interesting: Briscoe would suddenly be your title favorite at 55%. And if Briscoe runs it to 5 or 6 to close the season, he would very likely win the championship.
So Briscoe has certainly been Larson’s ally in the past few weeks… but that only goes so far. The longer this streak keeps going, and the driver who’s been doing Larson the most favors might suddenly become his biggest threat.