Whenever a new driver joins a multi-car team, particularly a very successful organization, there’s always going to be a learning curve for both the driver as well as his crew chief and the team around them. Such is also the case with Chase Briscoe.
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After losing his ride at the end of last season when Stewart-Haas Racing went out of business, Briscoe was in the right place at the right time when Martin Truex Jr. announced he’d be retiring from Joe Gibbs Racing, opening up a vacancy that Briscoe ultimately wound up filling.
Admittedly, it was a bit rocky at the start of the 2025 Cup season as Briscoe got used to crew chief James Small and the No. 19 crew, as they got used to Briscoe in return.
So is everyone on the same page now? Boy, are they or what! Briscoe began the Cup playoffs with a win this past Sunday in the Southern 500 at Darlington, making it back-to-back wins at the NASCAR Crown Jewel event.
Briscoe shared some of the early season struggles on this week’s edition of the Stacking Pennies podcast with Corey LaJoie and Skip Flores.
“The first 10 weeks of the season was just us figuring each other out, like just trying to even learn what a baseline is,” Briscoe said. “And in the beginning of the year, they’re kind of going just with what Martin (Truex Jr.) ran because they don’t know what I need in the car yet.
“And then over the course of the season, we’re 27 weeks in now, they’ve been able to learn what I like and the feel and they had that delta. So they’re able to now look back on notes of what did we run that was successful, but they kind of had this offset to know kind of what I like in the car.
“It’s definitely been a learning curve. And for James (crew chief James Small), too, working with a new driver. A lot of people think it’s just the driver, right? But it’s really, even the processes, like everything we do on the #19 team is so different now than really how they’ve worked over the course of the last three and a half, four years.”
While some may have said Briscoe inherited Truex’s old team, that’s not exactly true. The current team makeup is significantly different than the group that worked with Truex on the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota.
“The #19 team just in general is not really the same team that Martin had,” Briscoe said. “We have new engineers and a new car chief. They’re a lot different. So, we’re all kind of learning the processes and how we do things.”
Oh sim, can you see?
One of the biggest changes on the No. 19 team this year has been the use of a race simulator, to try and get a feel and prepare for each upcoming racetrack.
Briscoe continued, “The #19 hadn’t done the sim in three and a half years and now we do probably six to 10 hours a week on the sim. So, it’s just like all these things are so different from this team and the processes and it just took us a little bit of time.
“I feel like even today, we’re still trying to navigate what is that perfect week leading into a race weekend, and how do we navigate that and what’s too much, what’s not enough?”
Briscoe concluded by saying that the season had been a big learning curve, but the team was finally starting to hit the sweet spot of figuring out what truly worked for them.
