A few months into the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series season, Stewart-Haas Racing confirmed the impending shutdown that had long been rumored, leaving all four of their drivers without rides for the 2025 season.
Even with co-owner Gene Haas set to retain one of the four charters, all four of their Cup drivers needed to find new homes, as he brought Cole Custer up from the Xfinity Series team to drive the No. 41 Ford in 2025.
As the only former race winner of a group also consisting of Josh Berry, Noah Gragson, and Ryan Preece, Chase Briscoe immediately became one of the names to watch in free agency. He was in his fourth season with Stewart-Haas Racing, two years after making a run to the round of 8 of the playoffs after scoring his first career win at Phoenix Raceway.
Stewart-Haas Racing's decline had been evident ever since, however, and neither Briscoe nor any of his teammates had experienced much success in 2024 before the shutdown announcement came.
Skip ahead to 2025, and all four of their drivers did indeed find new rides in the Cup Series. And Briscoe ended up in the one he thought he had next to no chance to end up in: the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota.
How Chase Briscoe took a 'shot in the dark'
The 2024 season was not the first season in which there were an abundance of rumors surrounding the potential retirement of Martin Truex Jr. But every time those rumors had emerged in the past, they were answered with some kind of contract extension for the 2017 series champion.
But 2024 was different, and Briscoe wanted to make sure that he was on Joe Gibbs Racing's radar in the event that Truex did decide to call it a career.
"I found out, I think it was on a Tuesday or Wednesday, that Stewart-Haas was going to shut down," Briscoe told Beyond the Flag. "Tony Stewart came in and kind of told us all, ‘hey, look, this isn't going to continue anymore.’ And literally sitting right there in the conference room, I just started texting all the team presidents and owners that I knew or had phone numbers for.
"One of them was Joe Gibbs Racing. I texted Dave Alpern, the president, and just said, ‘hey, Stewart-Haas just let us know the team's shutting down, I'm obviously not going to be here next year, would love that opportunity if there's ever anything there.’ And truthfully, that was the one team I sent something to and thought it was just a total shot in the dark, that there was no chance that that would ever happen."
Something did happen, as Truex's future remained uncertain.
"Two days later, Dave texted me and said, ‘can I call you?’," Briscoe added. "And he said they wanted to meet for breakfast with a couple of the executives at JGR. That was on a Friday morning. Saturday morning, I get a text from a random phone number that said, ‘hey, this is Coach Gibbs, would love the opportunity to call you uh here in a couple minutes if I can.'
"So I talked to Coach for a couple minutes, and he said, ‘hey, we want to meet on Sunday." And so I met with him on Sunday, and he said, ‘I'll know on Monday if Martin's going to come back or not in the No. 19.’"
The next day, Truex decided not to return.
And by that point, Briscoe had established himself as the clear frontrunner to replace him thanks to those texts. He signed with the team later that day.
"I did all my contract stuff on Monday, and literally on Wednesday morning, I was signed to drive the No. 19 car," he continued. "So there are a lot of other things that kind of happened in the span of those couple days, but it was nuts.
"I literally went from having no job, twins on the way, to all of a sudden landing in one of the best cars and the best seats in the garage. So it was definitely just perfect timing for me. If Stewart-Haas Racing shuts down three months later, or three months earlier, who knows what happens? But for me, the timing of it was certainly perfect."
We just passed the one-year anniversary of the announcement of Stewart-Haas Racing's shutdown, and next month marks the one-year anniversary of the official announcement of Briscoe joining Joe Gibbs Racing.
"It does not seem like a year," Briscoe admitted. "That honestly feels like that's impossible that that was a year ago, but yeah, it was just a crazy week of my life."
He believes that the timing of it all was a God thing, and it's hard to make a case against that.
"It’s played a huge role," he said of his Christian faith. "Obviously on the race track, but off the race track as well, and just some of the struggles that we went through, but even on the race track, the whole Joe Gibbs opportunity is a total God thing, just how the doors opened at the perfect time; that stuff doesn't just happen.
"There's definitely a bigger reason for that, and even just being at JGR, Coach really has that culture of higher matter, so it's been great for me to be over there at a place that has the same beliefs as I do and I can be open about it, and it's definitely been a huge part of not only my life but certainly my career."
Briscoe endured a rough start to his first season with Joe Gibbs Racing, even after taking the pole position for the Daytona 500 and finishing in fourth place, the highest for a Daytona 500 polesitter in 25 years, as he was docked 100 points when the holes in the spoiler base of the No. 19 Toyota were found to be bigger than when supplied to the team.
But that penalty was later overturned.
"Yeah, it was a huge relief," he said. "Just to be in a mode of where you have to be in desperation mode; if you lose a 100 points from the get-go, you're in an instant must-win. And not to say that we can't win, I feel like we definitely can, but you just have to race so much differently whenever you're in a must-win, and you have to make race calls differently. And when you're in the mix points-wise, it just lets you go with the flow more.
"You don't have to act as desperate. You can just let the race come to you way more, where when you're in a must-win, you’re just so desperate to make moves that you probably shouldn't do. And it just allows you to race so much differently, getting those 100 points back. So it was a huge relief for us as a race team, and certainly for me as a driver."
The decision to overturn the penalty was more of a mental boost than anything for Briscoe as the season really started to ramp up, as the 100-point hole put him in a spot where he felt his amazing new opportunity could be all for naught in year number one.
"I was worried sick the first two or three weeks, just knowing that I have this amazing opportunity and now I'm all of a sudden in a must-win you after week one," he admitted. "It was definitely nice to get that overturned and definitely felt like it pumped kind of a new life into our season that early."
Briscoe finds himself inside the provisional playoff picture in 13th place in the point standings, rather than 32nd, after the first 11 races on the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series schedule.
After making it to the playoffs last year with a walk-off win in the regular season finale at Darlington Raceway, which resulted in a surprise spot in Season 2 of Netflix's "Full Speed" NASCAR series, he is looking to secure back-to-back playoff appearances for the first time in his career.