Chase Briscoe has a charming habit of peppering interviews with so many utterances of “truthfully,” it leads one to wonder if impostor syndrome is his superpower.
After locking into the Cup Series playoffs with his third career victory Sunday, there was no containing the verbal tic that belies Briscoe’s ability to accomplish extraordinary things amid extreme duress.
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“Really, it’s the first race we’ve executed, truthfully, all year long.”
“I was just waiting to run out of fuel, truthfully.”
“I truthfully did not think I was going to win. I’m still in shock, truthfully.”
Truthfully, there’s no denying this new reality.
It’s time to rank Briscoe among the elite drivers in NASCAR’s premier series.
Even though the first four months of his Joe Gibbs Racing tenure had him seriously doubting whether he belonged at a championship-caliber organization with several current and future Hall of Fame drivers accounting for the bulk of its 221 Cup wins.
When he signed with the team nearly a year ago, JGR gave Briscoe a not-so-subtle reminder of its sky-high expectations. In 40 attempts across its four cars, JGR had qualified 38 times for the playoffs.
“They said, ‘You better make the playoffs,’ ” Briscoe recalled on Prime Video’s post-race show Sunday. “So I’ve been getting more and more nervous. More guys have been winning and we haven’t been winning. My wife was like, ‘What’s the matter?’ I was like, ‘I have to win or I’m going to lose my job.’ “
Having joined teammates Denny Hamlin and Christopher Bell in the 2025 playoffs, it’s safe to say Briscoe’s status at JGR is safe. So is a pattern of overcoming adversity despite overwhelming odds throughout his NASCAR career — and always with refreshing honesty and aspiration.
Briscoe had recorded only two Xfinity Series wins when he plainly declared that he would need at least eight victories in 2020 to earn a promotion to Cup. He won nine races virtually out of nowhere that season and was moved to Cup by Stewart-Haas Racing.
Amid SHR’s impending shutdown last year, Briscoe vowed to send the team out properly amid the nagging worries of an uncertain future. He then won the Southern 500 regular-season finale.
He made the seemingly impossible seem normal again Sunday at Pocono Raceway.
With Hamlin, the track’s all-time winningest driver, ominously lurking in second for the last 34 laps, Briscoe coolly maintained his lead while achieving maximum fuel efficiency.
A split-second mistake on his final pit stop — Briscoe slammed the accelerator after being told “wait” by crew chief James Small — left him approximately nine laps short of the fuel necessary to reach the finish. But a combination of some timely caution laps and smoothly managing corner entry and exit put the No. 19 Toyota in Victory Lane for the first time in nearly two years.
Small was “shocked” that Briscoe prodigiously stretched his fuel to the checkered flag. The crew chief also said his ninth Cup win was his “proudest moment” at a team formerly synonymous with 2017 Cup champion Martin Truex Jr., who retired from full-time racing after last season.
There were no kid gloves in the transition and Small admitted to riding Briscoe hard while crediting his new driver’s willingness to listen and accept he would need to raise his game.
“It’s been a lot of work,” Small said. “From where he came from, there wasn’t much accountability. Nobody was holding his feet to the fire. That’s probably been a big wake-up call for him. We expect a lot. We demand perfection. That’s the personalities on this race team. We’re going to kill our grandma to win the race. He is a different personality type, especially to me.
“It’s been a challenge. I won’t lie. He has taken it in stride. He absorbs everything like a sponge. We’re still a work in progress. We’re far from being where we think we can be. He’s meeting our expectations. I still expect a lot from him. He’s only going to get better.”
The Pocono win highlighted how Briscoe has already improved. His biggest weakness traditionally was overdriving corners, which is antithetical to fuel saving with the feathery throttle that has been preached by Small — who cracked that “one of Chase’s great habits is to drive it until he sees Jesus.”
Sometimes, the coaching was overly forceful.
“It’s not been, I would say, smooth sailing from the get-go between James and I,” Briscoe said. “There’s an early part of the season where it was almost like, ‘Hey, we want you to drive this way.’ It didn’t feel right to me. I had to go to them and say, ‘Look, let me do my normal thing. If it works, great. If not, I’ll really try to change my whole style.’
“This last really month I feel like James has put a ton of trust in me to drive it to whatever I think is the best of my ability. They’ve done a really good job of just getting the car more suited for my driving style.”
Small said Briscoe “never complained once. He’s probably scared to complain to me. He’s very easy to get along with, very different to some drivers. No ego. It’s easy.”
Kyle Larson might be the bluntest superstar that the Cup Series has to offer, but Briscoe has a disarming and no-nonsense candor that endears him to team members such as Small, an Australian perfectionist with an occasionally short temper.
On a recent fishing trip for team building, Small had “the best time of my life” with Briscoe, a laid-back Indiana native known for his persistently upbeat attitude and smile.
JGR competition director Chris Gabehart said the Pocono victory would bring Briscoe and Small even closer.
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“They trusted each other the whole way and that is a special win,” said Gabehart, recalling his close-knit triumphs as Hamlin’s crew chief. “Sometimes, those wins bond the most and this is a very new group. There’s a lot of pressure on them to perform and I really can’t think of a better way to get the win. It’s hard to get to where you have implicit trust in one another.
“All the things that I know they’ve been through behind the scenes in the last six months, and then for it to come down to cutting it tighter than they needed to based on a (pit stop) mistake. Finding a way to work through that and trusting one another gets a win. That’s the special stuff.”
It’s also validating for Briscoe, who knew a few laps into his first practice at Bowman Gray Stadium that “the expectation is so much higher” in his new JGR ride.
“At SHR, it honestly felt like you shocked the world when you won,” he said. “Here, it doesn’t feel like that because they do win a lot.”
Though its Toyotas are prepared with optimum precision, JGR also puts a heavy onus on its drivers. They are required to pore through reams of engineering data and watch hours of weekly video.
Briscoe admitted the adjustment to the stringent homework assignments “took me a long time, longer than I would have liked,” and he noticed others thought so, too.
“I read the internet,” Briscoe said. “People are like, ‘Why would they put that guy in?’ Even when I won three poles in a row, not winning the race, people are trashing you. I knew we were more than capable. I knew myself that I was capable. You never really know until you go do it.”
At Pocono, he became the sixth Cup driver in the past eight races to get his first win this season. Each victory by a new playoff qualifier left Briscoe feeling his job hung more in the balance.
“It’s crazy, truthfully, now looking back on what I was racing against every single weekend,” he said. “Nothing against SHR. Now being inside the walls of JGR, it’s mind-blowing the level they do it at. The last couple weeks especially, I’ve just had this huge weight on my shoulders, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before in my career.
“I feel like I honestly weigh a hundred pounds less already.”
Truthfully, that would be hyperbole.
But how can you hold it against someone as appealing as Chase Briscoe?
Contributing: Zach Sturniolo from Pocono Raceway