(Photo: Wayne Riegle | The Podium Finish)
SPEEDWAY, Ind. — Chase Briscoe doesn’t know exactly how to characterize his 2023 season. He hasn’t had one like it before.
Through 23 races, Briscoe has just five top 10s with wild inconsistencies across the board. In 14 of those races, he’s finished 20th or worse. The No. 14 Stewart-Haas Racing team got the hammer dropped on them with an L3 penalty following the Charlotte Motor Speedway race weekend for a counterfeit part, resulting in a 120-point penalty and the loss of 25 playoff points.
Meanwhile, his three top fives came consecutively from Bristol Dirt to Talladega Superspeedway in April. Safe to say, 2023 has been an anomaly.
“It’s definitely been an interesting season, to say the least,” Briscoe said in a media call on Wednesday. “I feel like I’ve never had a season where it’s been just a really, really good day or really, really bad day. We either run top five, Top 10, or we run 30th or worse. There’s no in-between. So that part has just been extremely head-scratching.”
After the penalty resulted in a $250,000 fine and a six-race suspension for crew chief Johnny Klausmeier, SHR made a personnel switch, promoting Richard Boswell to the No. 14 team after serving as the Xfinity Series crew chief for Riley Herbst.
In six races with Boswell calling the shots, Briscoe has a best finish of 10th at New Hampshire Motor Speedway in July. However, they found themselves on the other end of the spectrum with a 31st-place result at Michigan International Speedway on Monday.
At 31st in points, Briscoe has no option but to win his way into the playoffs. He’ll have three more opportunities to do so, including Sunday on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Road Course.
Briscoe grew up in Mitchell, Indiana, about an hour and a half south of Indianapolis. He won the 2020 Xfinity Series race on the road course, a victory he said was one of the most special in his career. The course, however, has its challenges.
“I feel like you’re never safe there,” Briscoe said of the road course. “You can be in the front row, you can be in the middle or the back row – I think I’ve wrecked in all three of those scenarios. So, you’re never safe there, especially on the restarts. That Turn 1 is just chaos every single time. I do think the new format, or the change of the start/finish line with the restart zone, could potentially [help]. I think if we do that, it might help Turn 1 a little bit. But, you’re still going to have chaos because we’re going so fast.”
Afterward, trips to Watkins Glen International and Daytona Superspeedway wrap up the regular season.
Briscoe races Bubba Wallace at Michigan. (Photo: Wayne Riegle | The Podium Finish)
“[Watkins Glen is] kind of middle of the road. It’s definitely not the worst one confidence-wise that we go to. I’d say it has Sonoma by a lot,” Briscoe said. “Last year in the rain there, we were able to win Stage 1 and be really good in the wet there. If it was going to be wet, I’d feel really good about it. In the dry, I don’t feel as good there. I’ve always been good there, but never fast enough to really lead or be up-front. I’m always kind of 10th-12th there. I definitely need a little bit more there.
“You have to get to the end [at Daytona]. I mean, we saw that last year with Austin [Dillon] – there were only 10 or 12 cars on the racetrack. If you can miss the big wreck at the end, because the desperation is going to be so high, you can kind of sneak away with one. Truthfully, I think this year is going to be the most chaotic. For one, because you have so many good cars that are going to be in desperation. You look at the No. 48, the No. 99, the No. 9… there are just a ton of really good cars that are going to have to win probably to get in.”
As an organization, Stewart-Haas Racing is winless and future Hall-of-Famer Kevin Harvick is retiring after the season. Ford has struggled across the board with just four victories this season — two coming consecutively from Chris Buescher of RFK Racing the last two weeks. The manufacturer will debut a new Mustang in 2024 with the hope of addressing some of the aerodynamical deficits.
The No. 14 team wants to throw a Hail Mary toward the playoffs, but right now, even that might not be realistic.
“We know that this season, especially if we don’t win over these next three weeks, we’re not really racing for anything as far as playoffs and points go,” Briscoe said. “But, we can still make ourselves way better, and we have 13 weeks to make ourselves better for the 2024 season. Really find a foundation is what we need to do as a team. I think that’s our main focus — trying to get better.
“As much as we’d like to throw a Hail Mary and try to win one of these next couple races and even the ones the last couple of weeks, truthfully, we haven’t had the speed to do that. I think the first priority is finding the speed we need to be able to throw a Hail Mary, and then trying to build our team to be the best it can be going into 2024.”
