DARLINGTON, S.C. — Chase Briscoe may be a Hoosier by birth, but if the last two years in Darlington’s crown-jewel race have taught us anything, he’s become a full-fledged Southern boy.

After a night where he led 309 of 367 laps and won both stages en route to his second consecutive victory in Sunday’s Cook Out Southern 500, Briscoe asserted himself quickly as a top contender to win the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series Championship.

In a year where no one has been dominant enough to secure the moniker as title frontrunner, the driver of the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing delivered a masterclass at the South Carolina superspeedway that crew chief James Small envisioned earlier that day.

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“I woke up this morning and sent the guys a message, and I just had this feeling it was like we just need to go and lay a old school beat down to them, and that’s exactly what we did tonight,” Small said in Sunday’s post-race press conference. “Chase did a remarkable job lap after lap. The pit crew — on song tonight, they did an incredible job. They’ve been getting better and better all year, and really hit their stride in the last eight weeks or so. Just really proud of everyone.”

The improvements have been noticeable across the No. 19 team since the start of the season.

With a new driver and new crew members all looking to mesh together quickly, 2025 didn’t get off to the best of starts for Briscoe and co. They had just one top 10 through the first five races and struggled in practice and qualifying early in the year, with just three starts inside the top 10 through the first 12 events.

Small attributed it to everyone trying to jell and said that it took one race in early May for the switch to flip.

“I think it was like Kansas — final stage of Kansas — that was like the light switch when things started coming together and him really understanding it from that point on,” Small said. “There’s been a few hiccups along the way, and there’s been some issues on pit road along the way as well, but qualifying speed came in really well. We’ve been working really hard on that. When you qualify up front, it sets yourself up for a really successful Sunday in terms of getting as many points as you can. I think you’ve seen it not only our average finish, but our stage-point accumulation in that period is ridiculous compared to what we had in the first 10 races.”

What’s starting to blossom for Briscoe in his five-year Cup career so far is a knack for delivering in the brightest of lights. Becoming the first driver to ever win pole awards in the Daytona 500, Coca-Cola 600 and Brickyard 400 during the same year is already a ludicrous stat, but when you think back through the Hoosier’s young career so far, he’s been excelling in pressure-filled moments time and time again.

While driving for the now-defunct Stewart-Haas Racing, Briscoe pointed his way to the Round of 8 in 2022 and nearly clinched the unlikeliest of Championship 4 berths at Martinsville before being passed by now-teammate Christopher Bell with just five laps to go. Briscoe then won his first Southern 500 last year in what was the regular-season finale to secure SHR a playoff berth before closing its doors and rode a top-10 result at Bristol two weeks later into the Round of 12.

From the time he hopped in a stock car, Briscoe has been made for intense moments. For him, it’s been the definition of his racing career.

“I’ve always just loved high-pressure situations,” Briscoe said. “I feel like I just perform better for whatever reason. I feel like my whole career has always been a high-pressure situation, right? Like, there was no backup plan. You might only get one race you had to go perform and show your worth. I’ve always felt like I mean every week, I feel like I’m still auditioning to prove that I belong here. Certainly, the higher the pressure, the better I feel like I do.”

Amid a crop of Hendrick Motorsports, Team Penske and JGR competitors in the playoffs, Briscoe may be the least-discussed name when it comes to winning a championship. While it’s never been a concern for the 30-year-old driver, he now knows that the expectation in his first year with a Gibbs car is to make it deep into the playoffs, rather than having it come as a surprise.

“It seems like at JGR, it’s really the final four, but certainly if you don’t make it at least to the Round of 8, it is a huge failure,” Briscoe said. “When you look at the sport in general, there’s eight to 10 really good cars. If you aren’t one of those top eight, that normally means you didn’t have the most successful season. I mean, for us, I think starting the playoffs, as a team, we feel like we’re definitely capable of being Championship-4 caliber and, truthfully, even a champion. It’s just a matter of putting 10 weeks together, and obviously, we started week one the way we need to.”

Having worked with a past series champion in Martin Truex Jr., Small knows what will be asked of Briscoe and the No. 19 camp for the next nine weeks, and while a victory to start the postseason automatically moves them into the Round of 12, Small is not pumping the brakes heading to Gateway and Bristol.

“We can start focusing a little bit on the next round, but I feel like to win this championship as well, you need to be all in 36 races every time, just come try to beat everybody down,” Small said. “I guess the engineers can go to sleep a little earlier this week and not have to worry as much. But I think all the people on our team … we’re not going to change the level of effort we put into these next two. It’s just, you don’t have to worry, or if there’s a situation that might be opportunistic for not scoring stage points or whatever, but it’s going to set you up to win the race, you get the ability to do that.”

MORE: Playoff standings after Darlington | Gateway schedule

Minus the chaos the Charlotte Roval can bring to end the Round of 12 or the wild card at Talladega, which will be even more pivotal as it moves to the Round of 8, there are very few weak points for Briscoe during the remainder of the postseason.

Both Small and Briscoe dropped the phrase ‘Championship-4 caliber’ after Sunday’s win, but the No. 19’s stats have spoken for themselves this year.

If Briscoe continues to start races out front and be mistake-free, he’ll have more dominant performances over the next two months like he did in Darlington and be the true frontrunner for the Cup Series title.

“I feel like the playoffs really round out well for me statistically, and even at JGR, it’s all really great race tracks,” Briscoe said. “I mean, the Round of 8 is obviously the hard one just because you do have Talladega in there. But I definitely think that, if we can get there, I feel confident going to Phoenix, too.”