Chase Briscoe is in the midst of a heater in the NASCAR Cup Series Chase presented by Mobil 1.
Two wins and a fourth-place finish in the past three races have him firmly in the championship conversation, just behind his Joe Gibbs Racing teammates Denny Hamlin and Christopher Bell, all chasing Hendrick Motorsports’ Kyle Larson in the points lead.
Surely, with four races to go, that means this championship is a battle between JGR and Hendrick Motorsports, right?
“I don’t know if I would say that,” Briscoe cautioned after his Charlotte victory. “I think Penske is still very much in the mix.”
MORE: Chase standings | Phoenix schedule
Lurking at the back of the top five is Team Penske’s Ryan Blaney, 85 points behind Larson and 20 markers behind the JGR trio that sits between them. Logano, Penske’s three-time Cup Series champion, sits sixth, 92 points in arrears but still getting a whiff of the lingering point lead. In previous editions of the postseason, Team Penske had a knack for coming alive late, earning critical wins to advance through rounds and capitalizing at Phoenix Raceway, one of its most successful venues. Gone are the days of win-and-in, but victories for either Blaney or Logano could significantly alter the championship conversation with Phoenix ahead on Sunday (3 p.m. ET, USA Network, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
Blaney has won each of NASCAR’s past two trips to the Arizona gem, not to mention his three Talladega Superspeedway wins and two straight fall wins at Martinsville Speedway … the two tracks where NASCAR heads after Phoenix.
“When you think about Phoenix, they’ve been almost untouchable,” Briscoe said. “You go to Martinsville, I mean, Blaney has been absolutely unreal. So I feel like Penske is still very much in play. Blaney has even been leading on the white flag at Homestead too, and they’re going to be great at Talladega. So, I mean, I definitely think it comes down to Hendrick, JGR and Penske, which we hear every single week, right? But yeah, I would not say that it’s just a two-team race at this point.”
The 2023 champion has recent momentum on his side too. Blaney has finished inside the top five in each of the last three races, notching three straight top fives for the first time this season and all on intermediate ovals — the exact track type that concerned Team Penske entering The Chase.
“I’m very proud of the effort for sure,” Blaney said. “It’s at tracks that we’ve really put a big emphasis on ‘we have to get better here.’ And the last three weeks have been very, very good. Like our cars, the 2 (Austin Cindric) was good. The 22 (Logano) has been strong, so I feel like we’ve taken a big step in the right direction. We still have about another half step to go, I think, to catch a couple of those other guys, but overall, very proud of the effort that we want at Team Penske for digging in and getting better. … We’re not throwing sinks at it anymore. It’s small knobs.”
Team Penske’s competition director Travis Geisler knew this stretch of The Chase would be pivotal if any of the team’s three entries would contend for a championship. With two champions under the team’s banner inside a 100-point margin and a career-best stretch in progress for Cindric, he sees the Bill France Cup well within sight.
“It’s certainly been a good three races for us — it’s not as good as we need to be right now,” Geisler told NASCAR.com. “We’ve still got a little bit of margin to close up, but I think from where we’ve been, we feel like we’ve at least closed the gap significantly and have had some really strong cars. I think the 2 car’s performance over the last couple weeks has been great, honestly. The finish (Sunday) is unfortunate, but the rest of the races, they’ve had really good speed, and obviously Ryan’s had good speed. So yeah, still need to clean up some execution. Still got a little bit to go to be the best at these intermediates, but certainly able to walk out of these three and at least feel like we didn’t bury ourselves and we can race from here.”
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Now heading to some of the organization’s best tracks to close the season, the focus remains on improving rather than resting on its laurels. Blaney is a three-time winner this season, his most recent coming at New Hampshire Motor Speedway in August before The Chase began.
“He’s certainly got to get wins,” Geisler said of Blaney’s title hopes. “There’s no doubt you’re going to have to win a couple from here — which, hey, that’s the way the playoffs work. You should have to get wins in the playoffs. That’s the way any format of the playoffs should be. So I think that’s very possible. Obviously, the tracks line up really well for us. Still have a lot of confidence in that. Talladega is kind of an outlier for everybody, and that one’s just going to be ‘just try to finish.’ And if we finish there, we know we’ll be where we need to be.
“I think it’s all still up in the air right now. Certainly need to close the gap here over the next couple weeks and at least keep everybody honest at the end.”
A good chunk of the focus centers on Blaney thanks to his two wins at Phoenix and his recent Chase success at Martinsville. But Logano shouldn’t be an afterthought in this conversation. The three-time champ often performs best when the odds are stacked against him. They are right now, and Logano concedes he likely needs to win multiple times before the season’s over in order to win the title. But all the No. 22 team needs is a chance.
“At this point, I feel like we’ve definitely got to win at least two of the next four — maybe more — to pull this one off, which we can,” Logano said. “I feel like we’ve got a lot of good race tracks ahead of us. So still a positive attitude on it that we can still do it. It’s just gotten a little bit harder than we needed. I was really hoping to get out of this three-race stretch and these mile-and-a-halves 60 (points) or so out and try to make it up on our good tracks. But obviously, we’re a little further back than that.”
In the meantime, Blaney is all eyes forward, starting with Phoenix on the heels of his best stretch of races this year.
“I’m a big believer in carrying previous weekend momentum, confidence, stuff like that and going back to places that you’ve run well at,” Blaney said. “We got a lot of points to make up, but it is what it is. The best thing we can do is just go try to win two or three of them and see where you’re at and just keep going to work. So they’ve been doing a great job the whole Chase when we’ve been able to finish races, so just got to stick in there and keep running up front. Hopefully, we can get to Victory Lane a couple more times.”