“He has taken it in stride. He absorbs everything like a sponge.” James Small, the crew chief of the No. 19 JGR Toyota team, said these words about Chase Briscoe two weeks ago. Joe Gibbs’ recruit had towering challenges when he joined the team in 2025, but he is toppling them with ease. From adapting to a highly competitive environment to switching up his hard work, Briscoe is doing everything. And that will be useful in the upcoming race.
NASCAR’s third edition of the Chicago Street Race is coming up this Sunday. The 12-turn, 2.2-mile road course winds through downtown Chicago, demanding the best of drivers’ clutch skills. Chase Briscoe has an additional secret weapon at Joe Gibbs Racing, due to which he would be thoroughly prepared.
Chase Briscoe lets slip his secret ingredient
After a thunderous victory at Pocono Raceway, I am sure many fans would love to know that. Chase Briscoe was thrown into a whirlwind of obstacles when he shifted from Stewart-Haas Racing to Joe Gibbs’ fold. Aside from switching to Toyota, Briscoe also had to struggle to keep up with his star-studded teammates. Both Christopher Bell and Denny Hamlin are among the highest championship contenders this season. In fact, Hamlin, a 7-time Pocono winner, was sure that Briscoe would lose fuel by half a lap at The Great American Getaway 400 race. Yet Briscoe made Hamlin and his fans’ jaws drop by beating the 56-time Cup race winner by 0.682 seconds to the finish line. The secret to this success is not at all complicated, as it lies in Briscoe’s team resources.
Preparation for any NASCAR race, including the upcoming Chicago Street Race, can involve many things. Primarily, they are simulator sessions and watching movies. Well, Chase Briscoe has been diligently doing that, as he shared in a recent ‘Rubbin’ is Racing’ video: “I’ll go back and watch stuff of what I could have done better. YouTube TV makes it super easy because it has a little thumbnail, so you can go till you see the orange car on TV. So that part makes it nice…Leading up to the weekend, you go back and watch the previous year’s race. We now have all the data on the car, so you can go do that. There’s a lot of prep work that goes on behind the scenes.”
JGR also has a specialized sim that helps the drivers with everything like the right-hand gearshift, the steering weight and wheel size, the brakes, the throttle, etc. Chase Briscoe continued how he combines his learning from movies on the sim: “So, I’ll go back, watch that video, look through the data, and then there will be a summary of everything to do like the perfect lap…Then I’ll go to the simulator and try to apply all those things. And while I’m at the simulator, my team’s typically telling me, alright, like, based on the data compared to last year, you could still be doing this better – there’s a ton of stuff.” Briscoe slipped out his grueling preparation for Chicago as well: “This week alone, I’ve done 10 hours in the simulator.”
Chase Briscoe continued that joining JGR has been a wake-up call for him in terms of competitiveness. “So, there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes that I didn’t realize happened until I got to NASCAR. Truthfully, I thought guys raced on Sunday and hung out at the lake all week, and then went to the next track, and it’s far from that.”
Despite starting his star-studded career this year, Chase Briscoe can never forget the past. After all, one of his favorite victories happened before 2025.
Why this one struck a chord
Well, the good moments amidst a disaster tend to be the most beautiful. At this time last year, Chase Briscoe was still swimming in uncertainty. So were the 300+ employees of the now-disbanded Stewart-Haas Racing team. After 16 years of picking up 2 championships and 70 Cup Series wins, Tony Stewart‘s team shuttered. Briscoe picked up two of those 70 trophies. The first one came at Phoenix Raceway in his sophomore season of 2022, when Briscoe defeated Ross Chastain by 0.771 seconds. It made him the 200th different winner in NASCAR and cemented his place as a talented driver. For Briscoe, that win was special: “The first one’s special for a lot of reasons, right? It was the first one. Your whole life, you dream of getting to the Cup Series. And when you finally achieve that goal of winning in the Cup Series, it’s just this huge relief.”
However, his second victory for SHR trumped the first. While SHR was wrapping up its operations in 2024, Chase Briscoe still persevered. He and his No. 14 Ford team hoped to offer one last tribute to SHR before it dissolved. That is why when Briscoe held off a hard-charging Kyle Busch to win the Southern 500 race, it was amazing. Briscoe shared why that was his best win: “The Darlington victory holds a deeper meaning. “But if I had to choose one, it’d be the Southern 500, just because of the circumstances. With Stewart-Haas closing 10 races left, nobody expected us to win a race that season. And to do it in a Crown Jewel event, all the employees, everything that went into it, that was by far the most proud and biggest win. Plus, winning at Darlington is a big deal.”
Clearly, Chase Briscoe is now focused on picking up trophies. As the Chicago Street Race edges closer, let us see what tricks he has up his sleeve.
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