Ford Performance Racing School: Chase Briscoe Las Vegas Advance

Notes of Interest

 

●  Chase Briscoe, driver of the No. 14 Ford Performance Racing School Mustang, is fresh off his second top-20 finish in just his third NASCAR Cup Series start. Briscoe’s 18th-place finish last Sunday at Homestead-Miami Speedway positions the No. 14 team to build all-important momentum early in the season, beginning this Sunday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

 

●  Las Vegas has been one of Briscoe’s more successful tracks. He swept both NASCAR Xfinity Series races at the venue during the 2020 season and both wins aided in his pursuit of the championship. The first win on Feb. 23 secured Briscoe’s spot in the 12-driver playoff field, and the follow-up win in October locked him into the Round of 8. The No. 98 team went on to win once more at Kansas Speedway in Kansas City to advance to the Championship 4.

 

●  Briscoe has five career Xfinity Series starts at Las Vegas with two wins and three top-10s. He also made a NASCAR Camping World Truck Series appearance at the 1.5-mile oval in September 2017, starting third and leading the first 40 laps before finishing third in a Ford F-150.

 

●  Just two races into his inaugural Cup Series campaign, Briscoe leads the Rookie of the Year standings by 19 points over Anthony Alfredo. With Rookie of the Year honors in the Truck Series (2017) and Xfinity Series (2019), Briscoe is looking to join Erik Jones and William Byron as only the third driver in history to claim the title in all three of NASCAR’s national touring series.

 

Chase Briscoe, Driver of the No. 14 Ford Performance Racing School Mustang for Stewart-Haas Racing

 

How has it been working with crew chief Johnny Klausmeier so far?

“Johnny has been super pumped up. He’s been keeping me in the game as far as letting me know that, even though we’ve had damage or had to work back from being multiple laps down, we’re still doing really good. Like at the Daytona road course, we were still up in the mix there at the end and I felt like that was really our first attempt for me and Johnny to work together and actually make adjustments. He’s done a great job making adjustments for the situations that we’ve been in and the cars have been phenomenal. We’re just trying to stay focused on continuing to learn as much as we can about each other and build that notebook. Johnny has done a good job of keeping me motivated and telling me that it’s going to be hard in the beginning. We understand there are going to be challenges and learning curves to overcome. My entire team has done a really good job of understanding that it’s going to take a little bit of time to be consistently running up front, and it’s going to probably take tearing up racecars and making mistakes to learn not to do certain things anymore.”

 

Last week was the first real chance to get an idea of what you’ve got on the intermediate tracks that we’ll see throughout the season. How has that affected your outlook for this weekend at Las Vegas?

“Stewart-Haas Racing has always been strong at Las Vegas and, so far, the No. 14 team has done a great job having the cars set up close to what I need when we unload, so I feel good about this week. I’m still learning, though. Last week was a good chance to see what we had for 1.5-mile tracks, but you can only learn so much that carries over. Homestead and Las Vegas race so differently. I have a better idea of what it’s going to be like further back in the field and I’ll probably still take some time in the beginning to feel things out, but Las Vegas is a track I enjoy racing at and it definitely helps me to feel more comfortable knowing that I have had good results there in the past.”

 

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