SONOMA, Calif. — The weekend started well enough for Chase Briscoe. At past stays near Sonoma Raceway, the Stewart-Haas Racing team hotel was one of those dated inns that dot Northern California’s Wine Country. Briscoe had even warned two of his new teammates, Noah Gragson and Josh Berry, about the accommodations.
“Wait ’til you see this place,” Briscoe had said.
But when they checked into their rooms, there was a pleasant surprise: The hotel had been completely renovated, and the rooms were now modern and fresh.
That was a welcome development for a group that had only experienced bad news of late. On May 29, less than two weeks ago, Briscoe and his fellow SHR drivers — along with roughly 300 employees — learned they would need to start looking for jobs after co-owners Gene Haas and Tony Stewart announced the team would shut its doors at the end of the 2024 season.
Before telling all of the employees, Stewart called the team’s four drivers into a room and broke the news. When he was done, Stewart asked if any of them had any questions.
Briscoe had one. His contract forbade him from speaking to any other organizations, so he hadn’t proactively reached out to any other teams even though rumors about SHR’s future had circulated for months. Plus, there had been uncertainty over whether SHR would get rid of one or two cars and keep the rest.
“What does this mean as far as being allowed to talk to people now?” Briscoe asked.
“You guys are free to do whatever you want,” Stewart replied, according to Briscoe.
As soon as the meeting ended, Briscoe began sending texts to everyone he knew on various teams. The scramble came with a familiar feeling, reminiscent of when he first moved from Indiana to North Carolina with nothing.
“It’s not that you don’t have desire all the time, but it’s just different when your back is up against the wall and you have to go find something,” Briscoe said. “You’re willing to do whatever it takes to do it.”
Back when he first arrived in the Charlotte area, there was little chance Briscoe would ever become the lead driver for a team like SHR — let alone reach the top level of NASCAR. He was broke, a complete unknown with no connections. He alternated between sleeping on a friend’s couch and an air mattress for two years as he bounced around to various race shops looking for work.
Only a wildly unique series of remarkable coincidences allowed Briscoe to keep his dream alive, and it seemed to all come full circle when he was named to drive his childhood hero Stewart’s No. 14 car.
Briscoe won a race and made the playoffs in his second Cup Series season, validating SHR’s belief in his talent. But when the organization collectively took a downward turn last year, all the drivers struggled to find speed; even future Hall of Famer Kevin Harvick went winless before retiring.
This season, Briscoe has led the way for a somewhat-resurgent SHR and had put his team in playoff contention entering Sonoma. That performance had many convinced Briscoe was assured of a ride somewhere for next year, even after news of the closure broke. But the driver said it’s far from certain.
“I’m trying to audition every single week,” he said. “You have to show your worth in the sport. You see guys all the time who were successful and they have a couple of bad years and they fizzle out. So you have to be relevant week in and week out to get a ride.”
Briscoe cannot afford to fail at this — literally. He cannot go back to sleeping on couches because, unlike when he first arrived in North Carolina, he now has a wife (Marissa) and a 2-year-old son (Brooks). Oh, and Marissa is pregnant with twins, due in October.
“Even the teams I’ve sat down with, I’ve told them: ‘Time is of the essence with me as far as getting something done, because I can’t get left out,’” he said. “I was adamant with everyone I met with: ‘You’re gonna see effort out of me just because I’m not like some of the other guys who have something to fall back on. This is all-in for me.’ So it definitely makes a difference knowing you have a family to provide for.”
Chase Briscoe, pictured at last week’s race in Illinois, needs a new ride for next season with Stewart-Haas Racing shutting its doors. (Sean Gardner / Getty Images)
And if time is of the essence, Briscoe needs to have good results. Now. He knows this from experience, too. In the fall of 2018, Briscoe thought he might get fired while running in a partial schedule in NASCAR’s second-tier Xfinity Series. No one had spoken to him about the 2019 season, and it was getting late in the year.
Suddenly, he won a race on the Charlotte road course and, within two days, Ford executives were calling asking what they could do to get him in a car full-time for the next season.
“Say there are six or seven people who are free agents,” Briscoe said. “If you’re outrunning them by 10-plus positions, you’re the pretty girl at the dance. It just gives you more leverage. Teams are more apt to call you and talk to you because they know there are probably other people doing the same thing.
“If you’re not, they aren’t in a rush to call you because they think they’re going to be able to get you at whatever point into the process. Running good definitely changes the tempo of everything.”
With that in mind, and with his team just 10 points out of a playoff spot, Briscoe showed up to Sonoma as prepared as possible. He took extra time to sift through details and see if he could find anything minor to help make gains. He changed the way he drives in the weekly simulator sessions, trying to be neat and tidy to drill the finer points of the hilly, twisty course into his brain.
And Briscoe is a good road racer, so there was optimism he could have a good weekend and prove his worth to teams while keeping his own group in the playoff hunt.
But from the start, it didn’t turn out that way.
During practice, Briscoe felt like his car was “on eggshells” and he had to “tiptoe around” instead of driving aggressively. At one point, he returned to the garage to make a change on the car, but the team experienced difficulty with the adjustment; instead of taking three minutes, it took 15. Briscoe then ran out of time and never got to practice his qualifying lap.
That left Briscoe with a bit of concern heading into qualifying, because the starting position could dictate his entire weekend.
“It’s really hard to pass, so you can’t qualify 20th on back and expect to do anything,” he said.
But during qualifying, perhaps due in part to that lack of a mock run, he nearly wrecked in Turn 1 and lost a half second. Briscoe recovered for the rest of the lap, except it was too late — he had qualified 23rd, which was exactly what he’d been worried about.
Chase Briscoe’s team pushes his car to the garage at Sonoma. Hoping for a strong result amid Stewart-Haas Racing’s demise, Briscoe instead finished 34th. (Jeff Gluck / The Athletic)
Predictably, it had consequences after only 19 laps. As is the case many times when racing in a jumbled mess on road courses, Briscoe was tagged from behind by another car — in this case, Austin Cindric. He was spun around, and contact with another car ripped the rear bumper cover off — leaving a cavernous hole NASCAR eventually forced the No. 14 team to fix.
“Obviously, everybody knows you can’t give an inch,” Briscoe said of the accident. “Nobody wants to lift because if you give up a spot, you can’t get it back for another 10 laps.”
Still, knowing what was at stake both personally and professionally, Briscoe tried to salvage the day. He climbed up to 17th at one point — even with the damaged rear end — and his team seemed to put him in a strategy position that could result in a top-20.
But with 40 laps to go, Briscoe suddenly heard a weird clicking noise. When he’d turn to the right, the sound would get worse — and louder. Then the clicking turned into grinding, the grinding turned into a vibration and the vibration became accompanied by the strong scent of oil.
Something on his car, it seemed, was about to blow up. So Briscoe drove into the pits, but his points-desperate team told him to return to the track and run the car until it broke.
Except it already had. When Briscoe tried to shift into gear, the car wouldn’t go anywhere. It was just … stopped. With a broken transmission.
“That’s how a day like today probably should end,” crew chief Richard Boswell said on the team radio. “Sorry for the past few weeks. It’s been rough.”
As the rest of the cars kept zipping around Sonoma on the most pleasant of Northern California days, five crew members labored to shove Briscoe’s car up the hill to the garage area.
He took his gloves off, climbed from the car and removed his head-and-neck restraint, his earbuds and his helmet. Briscoe had finished 34th and only scored three points — dropping him to 17th in the standings and in the sort of hole (27 points) that makes a playoff berth less realistic.
“As hard as it is, you’ve just got to try to look past it,” Briscoe said. “Everybody throughout the season is going to have bad weeks; it’s just the timing of it that is bad for us.
“But we do have a stretch of really good racetracks for me coming up. And honestly, we just need to win. At the end of the day, that’s what you’ve got to do.”
GO DEEPER
Kyle Larson wins NASCAR Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Sonoma
(Top photo of Chase Briscoe’s damaged car at Sonoma Raceway: Douglas Stringer / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
