Briscoe finally gets a finish, but still had another hard fought Sunday race

Chase Briscoe started his Sunday in Las Vegas by getting pulled over for speeding on his way to the racetrack. A few hours later, he was called for speeding again, this time by NASCAR.

Briscoe was penalized on lap 32 under green flag conditions in the first stage. It was the very first pit cycle of the afternoon, and sent the Joe Gibbs Racing to 33rd in the running. But even worse, he fell one lap down.

It would not be until a caution with 57 laps to go that Briscoe would return to the lead lap. From there, he went to work digging out of the hole he was in to finish eighth.

“I think they said I was 0.4 over on pit road,” Briscoe said of his penalty. “I was 12 over on whatever the road was [driving to the track]. I’d rather have two of those than one I did today [in the race].”

At the time of the final caution — the only natural caution of the afternoon, which played a part in hindering Briscoe’s ability to get back on the lead lap sooner — he was running 18th. The race restarted for the final time with 50 laps to go. Briscoe needed every lap to make his charge.

“I think we restarted 24th there and I got to seventh, I think, and then I kind of died,” Briscoe said. “It was very similar to yesterday’s race, where you start so far back there, and you just burn all your stuff up trying to get up there, and then you die off at the end. I wasn’t mad. I did it to myself, so there wasn’t anything I could be mad about.

“I was trying to make up for the setback I caused our team.”

The effort, which Briscoe naturally called a hard-fought day, delivered the No. 19 team only its second top-10 finish in the first five races. A rough start to the season, including two straight DNFs the last two weeks, buried Briscoe in points, 33rd, entering the weekend in Sin City, and the speeding penalty took away the opportunity for stage points.

But the finish propelled Briscoe to 26th in the championship standings.

“You can’t blame today on bad luck; that’s just me not doing my job by speeding on pit road,” Briscoe said. “I was lucky today to catch that caution finally. We were like the 13th car a lap down and were able to drive all the way up there and finally get the caution. I’m glad we at least have some momentum now. This will help, obviously, next week at Darlington to not go out crazy early in qualifying.

“Hopefully, it’ll turn around. Another extremely fast car that I felt like could have been capable of competing for the win, I was just stuck back there all day.”

It hasn’t been a speed problem for Briscoe and his group, only the results. The speed has even been noticeable to the competition, as Brad Keselowski expressed ahead of Sunday’s race that he felt Briscoe had the fastest car in the series since the end of last season.

“I definitely feel like, from a speed standpoint, every race from really the Southern 500 last year to all the way to this point, we’ve been a top-three car literally every single week,” Briscoe said. “Yeah, we don’t have a ton to show for it, but if you keep bringing fast enough, eventually you’re going to win more and more races. So, yeah, we’ve got to get a little momentum going and once we do that, I think we’ll be in a really good spot.”

Briscoe is the most recent winner at Darlington Raceway, the site of the series next stop. In September, he won the Southern 500, which was his third win driving for Gibbs.