Chase Briscoe had no choice in the final lap of Sunday’s NASCAR Cup race at Dover Motor Speedway: he had to take one for the team and finish second.
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Had it been any other driver in front of him as the checkered flag waved in the distance, Briscoe might have been tempted to bump-and-run the leader out of the way and take the win for himself. But the guy in front of Briscoe was his Joe Gibbs Racing teammate, Denny Hamlin, and there was no way Briscoe was going to take Hamlin out.
“If it wasn’t a teammate, I definitely could have been a little more aggressive,” Briscoe said after finishing 0.310 seconds behind Hamlin. “But the odds of one of us wrecking were pretty high and I wanted to make sure a JGR car at least won the race.
“It would not have been a good Monday morning meeting if I go in there and do something and wreck us both and somebody else wins. I was trying to be smart about it.”
But that’s not to say Briscoe wasn’t tempted a few times in that last lap. However, there was a little voice in the back of his head that kept saying “don’t do it.”
“He (Hamlin) was doing such a good job of pinning me so tight that I couldn’t really do a whole lot,” Briscoe said of Hamlin. “I was two-three inches away from clearing him a couple times and just couldn’t get it done. Denny was probably the best car so it would have been pretty hard to pass him.”
@chasebriscoe says he would have raced differently in the closing laps if he was not racing a teammate for the win. pic.twitter.com/6s5WzBLC3z
— Frontstretch (@Frontstretch) July 20, 2025
Hamlin understood the dilemma Briscoe faced
Hamlin definitely understood the dilemma his young teammate had. Briscoe was hungry for another win, but he had to honor the JGR pecking order and yield to his elder teammate.
“Yeah, that’s the toughest line to walk, truthfully. Because if it is someone else, you don’t mind running them up in the fuzz, right?” Hamlin said. “But if it’s a teammate, you’ve got to see that guy tomorrow afternoon. So it’s just a little different in that aspect.”
While Briscoe was one of the guys Hamlin had to worry about on the last restart in the double overtime finish, he actually was initially more concerned about another JGR teammate, Christopher Bell.
As Hamlin and Bell walked back to their cars to resume the race after a late rain delay, the 44-year-old Hamlin made his position quite clear to his younger teammate, as the elder statesman of the JGR team and the oldest active full-time driver in the Cup Series.
“Just don’t wipe me out,” Hamlin quipped to Bell, both kidding and serious at the same time. “I was afraid we’ve got old tires, I don’t know what the grip level of the track is, I just didn’t want JGR to clean itself out and then somebody else won it.
“I think truthfully, he probably laid off of me there off of (turn) four and ended up wrecking himself because he didn’t want to have the big contact. So it was good hard racing.
“Ultimately, I got the better end of all the restarts in the end, but it was certainly stressful to have to overcome those three overtime finishes there, or however many cautions it was. It was a tough battle.”
