Joe Gibbs Racing Toyotas missed their setups big time heading into the Iowa race weekend. Chase Briscoe and Denny Hamlin’s teams were practically running similar setups and had the same issues with the brakes. Both cars didn’t have consistent brake pressure, and they were forced to work into the early hours of Sunday to address the issue.
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A P6 finish by Briscoe on paper makes it look like the JGR team found a fix. But in reality, the JGR driver was on the edge and uncertain about how his race car would react. “Yesterday was nerve-wracking, and I’ve never really had anxiety going into the race just knowing what was at stake. Just as a race car driver, like, you have no brakes, it’s miserable, it’s terrifying,” Briscoe said after the race.
Briscoe didn’t want to spark a crash, knowing that he didn’t have full control of his race car because of the brake issues. Early in the race, Tyler Reddick lost control of his race car and crashed into Erik Jones. Jones wasn’t even racing Reddick at the time, but the No. 45 car snapped, and Jones found himself on the bitter end of the deal. They both ended the race with a DNF.
“I would have a restart and it would be good for five or six laps, then right back to the floor. And I mean, I was just pumping nonstop all the way around the racetrack. This made it really, really challenging to race around guys, driving underneath them, so you don’t want to run through somebody because you don’t have brakes,” Briscoe added.
Ideally, teams would resolve all the issues with their race cars ahead of Sunday. But JGR ran into a rather unique problem. NASCAR rules didn’t allow them to change the brake pads until the green flag waved, which would cost them laps. So Briscoe’s team ran with what they had in hopes of avoiding a major incident. But the No. 11 team changed the brake coolant, which saw them start the race at the rear.
This wasn’t an experiment or something new that JGR tried at Iowa. “It’s not like it was a new package for us. We’ve run it successfully at a bunch of other short tracks and Nashville. And yeah, I was just thankful to hang on and we took a sixth and moved up into fifth in the standings, so it was an overall decent day,” Briscoe’s crew chief, James Small, said.
Call it luck or improvisation, both Briscoe and Hamlin were able to see the race out with solid finishes, P6 and P5.