For Briscoe, a change in team has brought a change in mindset

Chase Briscoe is experiencing yet another mental shift.

It is the side effect of driving a Joe Gibbs Racing car. Briscoe, who inherited the No. 19 Toyota this season after future NASCAR Hall of Famer and former Cup Series champion Martin Truex Jr. retired, knows this is the best opportunity he’s ever had at this level. He has the potential to win every weekend, and even if he doesn’t, Briscoe is now a driver who consistently finds himself in the top half of the leaderboard. He is expected to win and make noise in the postseason.

Briscoe is a contender. And as such, it brings a new mindset, one that differs from the one he spent the last four years in, which was just existing in the Cup Series field. 

“It’s definitely different, and I’ve gone through all kinds of different mindsets,” Briscoe tells RACER. “I look to 2020, the Xfinity Series year, and this one is very similar. But when I first came to Cup, the year before Stewart-Haas Racing had won like 15 races as a company, and you come in with those expectations, and that is the year everything started to go downhill. We were still able to win there, but the consistency for all of us wasn’t there. You knew every weekend you were behind, and we didn’t know why. 

“But we knew that every weekend, you could show up and be in the mix or battle for 20th. You didn’t know what to expect. Then you go through the last couple of years where we were in the field, and there were three or four weeks where we would be a top-five car. But for the most part, we were just out there.”

Briscoe joined the Cup Series field with Stewart-Haas in 2021. It was a year later that he scored his first career win. The second win didn’t come until the fall of 2024, when his team secured a spot in the postseason with a triumph in the regular season finale at Darlington Raceway. By the time his tenure at Stewart-Haas was done, Briscoe had won two races in 144 starts.

Stewart-Haas won five races between 2021 and 2024, including the two from Briscoe. Only two of its drivers, Briscoe and Harvick, finished in the top 10 in points in that time period.

“Now you go to this year where I feel like I am one of the (top) guys who are always in the mix,” Briscoe says. “That’s fun because when you’re competing against those guys, it’s very frustrating because you feel like you've never been given the same opportunity you could do what they’re doing. But you don’t know until you get that opportunity, and I’m grateful that I got it, and now I feel I’ve proven to myself even that I’m capable of doing it at this level. 

“But it is wild how much my mentality has shifted from year to year. I’ve gone from being out there to now feeling like I have a legitimate shot at being a Cup Series champion. That’s a wild feeling.”

Briscoe was the star of the first round of the postseason, leading not only the playoff drivers but the series in points earned (133) in those three races. He finished first, second, and ninth in the round, and was the only playoff driver to finish inside the top 10 in all three races. The victory at Darlington Raceway came in dominating fashion when he led 309 of 267 laps.

Briscoe was dominant at Darlington, and made this the first multiple-win season of his career. Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images

Joe Gibbs’ hiring of Briscoe seemed natural to some but was questioned by others. Briscoe had big shoes to fill with Truex’s departure, and there were questions as to whether the team, led by James Small, could still get the job done, considering they won three races over the last three seasons Truex was there.

From the start, however, Briscoe and Small explained how their partnership would differ. Briscoe is local to North Carolina and enjoys being present at the race shop. Small was also eager to get the team back on the simulator during the week, which hadn’t been done in three years. Both of those, according to Briscoe, have made a huge difference from a process standpoint.

“The sim stuff, it’s not as much about me as it is the team,” Briscoe said. “They can do so much more when they can have the driver there. Nothing against Martin; I would have done the same thing if I had the opportunity. But I think for us, it’s been unique because it’s not really the same team when Martin was driving anyway, with a new car chief and engineers. So, it was kind of a reset for all of us, and we’ve been able to re-baseline who we are as a team. 

“Yes, it is a new pairing, but it almost feels like a new team in general because all of us are doing stuff we’ve never done before. It was kind of a clean slate. There was no, ‘Well, this is how we’ve always done it.’ We’ve learned as we’ve gone and … we’re still refining and learning how we could do stuff better.”

The start of the season was “way harder” than Briscoe thought it would be, although the team put together some decent runs. Charlotte could be looked at as the turning point. Briscoe admittedly struggled to adjust to driving a new car and the team was struggling to put together clean races. But after doing a tire test at Charlotte and then running back-to-back intermediate races at Kansas Speedway and Charlotte, where he finished fourth and third, it seemed the comfort had been found.

“Stuff is easier now,” Briscoe says.

The in-race performance and results have come together as expected. Briscoe and the entire Gibbs operation eventually found what they were looking for with how the cars drove. Plus, the more time Briscoe started to spend up front, the more he found himself being raced differently.

“Where at the beginning of the year, you’re the new guy that’s not normally racing up front,” Briscoe says. “So, now everything is way easier than it was at the beginning of the year. Some of that, too, is that I was drinking through a fire hose then. I would say that was the one thing that was surprising. But at the same time, it’s been surprising these last couple of months how easy it’s all happened.”

Statistically, in one season driving a Gibbs car, Briscoe is surpassing all of his previous Cup Series numbers. The two victories are the first time he’s won multiple races in a season. The 12 top-five finishes are one behind the number of top-five finishes he earned in four years at Stewart-Haas. And the 789 laps he’s led are more than those he led at Stewart-Haas in four years combined.

“I was telling (wife) Marrissa a couple of weeks ago, I feel like I’m in Xfinity in 2020 again,” Briscoe said. “You go to the racetrack and know you have a shot to win, and as long as you do your job, you’re going to be in the mix. That’s a wild feeling for me to feel in the Cup Series. I feel like I’ve been in Cup forever - it’s only been four years – but when you have four years of only having maybe four opportunities to even have a car capable of winning to now 20-something, it’s a huge adjustment.”

Briscoe is 12 points above the cutline with two races left in the Round of 12. In his only other playoff appearance, he did advance into the Round of 8 and ultimately finished ninth in the standings. But that is far from his mind for him and the team now as they look at championship contention.