It's Like 300 MPH: How Racing Dirt Slows Down NASCAR's Chase Briscoe
Chase Briscoe has raced at NASCAR's highest level for just three years. Despite that, he is the longest-tenured driver, winningest driver, and de facto team leader at a championship-winning Stewart-Haas Racing operation. That is a difficult place for any young driver to be, and the 29-year-old Briscoe's job has been made all the more complicated by the reality that SHR did not win a single race last year. In his back pocket is a secret weapon: A side job as a dirt racer, the same thing that sparked team co-owner Tony Stewart's three-championship stock car racing career.
Briscoe grew up driving 410 sprint cars, the most powerful major class of open-wheel dirt racing. The cars are something like the final evolution of Indy racers of the Fifties, lightweight and short wheelbase with a huge engine at the heart of a roll cage, a seat, and four cartoonish-looking tires. There is not much else to any dirt car, and that means very little in the way of crash protection.
That means these cars are dangerous. Alex Bowman, another NASCAR driver, broke his back running a dirt track in an open wheeled car last year and missed a few races. The combination of powerful cars and loose surfaces also makes dirt racing a unique challenge, one that emphasizes throttle control and understanding of how a track changes in real time.
Those skills translate, and they translate even when jumping between dirt cars and stock cars in the same season. Bowman's teammate Kyle Larson is the best active driver on dirt in addition to his work as a major contender in the Cup Series. Larson will regularly win a race in a dirt car mid-week before hopping in a Cup car, and the same skills that make him good on dirt are the ones that make him a force to be reckoned with on any paved oval.
The Chili Bowl, an indoor dirt race held in Oklahoma every year, has long been the offseason All-Star race of choice for oval drivers in need of a challenge. Briscoe is one of many NASCAR Cup Series stars who have given it a try over the years, a list that notably includes former event winners Larson and Christopher Bell. This year, Bell took the race off and Larson missed the event after failing to qualify on the only preliminary night he could run while honoring previous commitments in another type of dirt racing car. That made Briscoe, who earned a spot in a B-Main during his own preliminary night, the only Cup Series driver with a realistic shot of racing in the event's feature race.
Briscoe never felt better all weekend than he did in his preliminary. The car was dialed in, and a real shot at a win in the final feature seemed possible.
"I had to start 12th, and I was able to drive up to fifth or sixth in the first eight or nine laps. I was battling, kind of for second, third, the whole race, the last fifteen laps of the race," Briscoe recalls. "I had a really good car that was able to go wherever I needed to go, and it felt good to have a car that could just kind of go forward and I could pick and choose where to go."
Larson's weekend ended before it began, with a flip on his preliminary night. With no real way to make his way back to the temporary track in time for his qualifying main, he bowed out. That put all NASCAR eyes on Briscoe, who advanced to the A-Main despite a car that he felt could have used more adjustments.
Briscoe was uncompetitive in the final race, an issue he thinks boils down to his own concerns about changing what worked under different conditions earlier in the week. "It's kind of frustrating, it kind of fell back on me and not being aggressive enough to be willing to change setup stuff. It's kind of a lesson learned, and hopefully we get another shot at it."
Historically, teams have made an effort to keep their valuable NASCAR Cup Series driving talent out of more dangerous dirt cars. That pattern is changing, in part because Larson's dominant 2021 Cup Series championship came alongside dirt wins in the Chili Bowl, Knoxville Nationals, Kings Royal, and Prairie Dirt Classic.
The risk is still there, but it is not the only risk drivers face in their extracurricular activities. Bowman's season-derailing injury came in a car, but his and Larson's teammate Chase Elliott suffered a major injury of his own on a snowboard in the same season. Larson has still been allowed to race his dirt cars since, and Stewart-Haas Racing is giving Briscoe that opportunity, too. The justification for the team is simple: When Briscoe runs a dirt race before a Cup event, both he and the team think it helps him in the race that weekend.
"We talk internally at SHR about the dirt races, whether I should be doing them or not doing them, and we all kind of agree that every time I ran the dirt stuff it definitely was a benefit on the Cup side," Briscoe says. "I definitely see the value in it, and there's a lot more that goes into it being busy and stuff like that, but I feel like it benefitted because it slows the Cup car down so much when I run a sprint car or a midget before the weekend. Hopefully adding to the schedule, the Cup side will see the benefit."
Briscoe will run both the smaller car he ran during the Chili Bowl and a bigger Sprint car during the regular season, part of a schedule of what he expects to be 15 to 20 dirt races. The added races in the Sprint car make that a busier schedule than in past years, but he sees those races as the most valuable of all. "A winged Sprint car feels like you're running 300, 400 miles an hour. It's just so fast, and you have to be able to process things so quickly. A winged Sprint car for sure feels like it slows down the Cup car."
After winning a race and impressing in the playoffs to finish 9th in his sophomore year in the Cup Series, Briscoe finished 2023 a disastrous 30th. After a quiet Daytona race weekend, he has started his fourth season in NASCAR with a strong tenth place finish. Over the next 25 races, the success or failure of a four-car operation that does not employ another Cup series race winner will fall on his shoulders. Briscoe tells R&T that his experience running his multi-car dirt racing operation will help him adjust to all the new personalities around him, but success will ultimately come down to whether or not he and his teammates can actually win the races in front of them.
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