It’s often said that pressure is a privilege. You’ll find no greater proponent of that phrase than NASCAR Cup Series driver Chase Briscoe.
Over the course of his five-year Cup Series career, Briscoe has risen to the occasion several times. That was the case on Sunday evening at Darlington Raceway, where he led 309 laps en route to his second consecutive win in the Southern 500.
Another crown jewel win? Check. A ticket to the next round of the Cup Series playoffs? Check.
When the bright lights that surround Darlington Raceway were turned on, Briscoe turned in the best performance of his NASCAR career.
“I’ve always just loved high-pressure situations,” Briscoe said in his post-race news conference. “I feel like I just perform better for whatever reason.
I feel like my whole career has always been a high-pressure situation, right? There was no backup plan. You might only get one race, you got to go perform, show your worth. I’ve always felt like every week I’m still auditioning to prove that I belong here. Certainly the higher the pressure, the better I feel like I do for whatever reason.”
That’s an invaluable trait for a driver in the modern NASCAR landscape, which hinges on the best drivers being able to perform over the course of the 10-race stretch that makes up the NASCAR playoffs.
A first-round win and a berth in Round of 12 certainly isn’t the desired end game for Briscoe and the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing team. There’s an expectation at JGR for all of its drivers to compete for championships on a yearly basis.
With two victories in his first season with Joe Gibbs Racing, Briscoe is looking like a title favorite and doing exactly what he was hired by Joe Gibbs to do – even if Gibbs was initially unsure of what Briscoe and crew chief James Small could accomplish together.
“You come to a new team. You got to form a relationship with your crew chief and everybody, your pit crew, the engineering group, everybody that works on the car,” Gibbs said in a post-race news conference. “That’s really hard to do.
I got to tell you, it’s a credit to James and everybody, to Chase, the way they’ve approached this in a very quick way and put that car up front. It’s been extremely fast. Had great finishes. To get our second win with it, I don’t think any of us would probably have felt that that would have been possible.”
With high expectations being realized by Briscoe, the only thing left to do is go chase a championship.
For a night, at least, Briscoe and the No. 19 deserve to celebrate a win in one of NASCAR’s crown jewel events. So too does Briscoe’s son, Brooks.
“I said, Daddy, you won a big race,” Brooks explained when asked to document how he celebrated with his father. “It went super, super fast, the pit stop. Just keep going and going and going and going and going. Then he won the race.”
“There you have it,” Briscoe said.
Quotes provided by NASCAR Media unless otherwise noted.
