(Photo: Molly Gastineau | The Podium Finish)
RIDGEWAY, Va. — After a crash at Homestead-Miami Speedway, Chase Briscoe enters Martinsville Speedway in a difficult points situation.
Essentially, Briscose must win the Xfinity 500 on Sunday to advance to the Championship 4. At 44 points below the cutline, it’s highly unlikely for Briscoe to point his way in.
But, Briscoe is trying to find positives despite knowing what he’s up against.
“It’s disappointing for sure, but it’s not as disappointing as the other eight guys that are already knocked out,” Briscoe said Saturday. “We still have a one in eight chance. It’s a slim chance, but we still have a chance, where there are eight other guys who don’t even have a shot to be in the final four. There’s still a lot to be proud of.”
Briscoe has had an up-and-down Playoffs, but it’s been enough to keep his title hopes alive. A pair of top-15 finishes at Kansas and Bristol paved a path into the Round of 12, while a miraculous final restart at the Charlotte ROVAL allowed him to make the Round of 8.
It’s about surviving and advancing — something he’s grown used to. He contended for the 2019 and the 2020 Xfinity Series championships and has experience in similar situations.
“I would say honestly that the intensity has not been as high as I thought it was going to be,” Briscoe said. “I thought it was gonna be is I thought it was gonna be exponentially more than even what the Xfinity Series was from an intensity standpoint and it’s kind of the same. That kind of caught me off guard because I did think it would be a little more, and I just feel like at the Cup level everybody is so cut-throat now anyways.
“I feel like in the playoffs I’ve learned a lot about how to put the whole race together, where I probably didn’t do the best job of that for really my entire career. I felt like in the playoffs we had a string of four races where I would say two of those we definitely finished better than where we ran all day and it was just a matter of putting yourself in position and just chipping away at it.”
While he’s excited to still be in championship contention, Briscoe believes he could’ve accomplished more to this point.
(Photo: Christopher Vargas | The Podium Finish)
“I would say underachieved a little bit just because I know what we’re capable of, like when we put it all together, truthfully, we could have three race wins right now just based off speed alone,” Briscoe said. “So, only having eight or nine top 10s, when we put the whole race together – the last four weeks we’ve done it in and that’s where we should be week in and week out and a lot of that falls on me, so I feel like I underachieved just from not finishing.”
Briscoe has had success at Martinsville in the past, finishing seventh in his only Xfinity race. He finished ninth in the spring Cup race, where drivers said it was extremely difficult to pass.
Briscoe knew he needed to qualify well Saturday to have early track position Sunday. He did exactly that, qualifying his No. 14 Ford Mustang third.
“We’ve been really, really good qualifying on the short tracks,” Briscoe said. “If it’s gonna be as hard to pass as it was the first race, then starting up front is gonna be huge, and the pit stall selection is massive here.”
Sunday’s Xfinity 500 is scheduled for 2 p.m. ET on NBC. Alex Bowman, who is missing his fifth race with a concussion, won last year’s race.
