The high groove at Kansas Speedway leaves very little room for error. Get it right, and you can carry high speed down the straightaways. Get it wrong, and the you risk hitting the outside wall. For 23 laps on Sunday, Chase Briscoe pushed that line while trying to hold off Kyle Larson.
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Briscoe had passed Larson for the lead with 30 laps to go and later admitted he thought he was going to “run away with it.” But Larson stayed close, and Briscoe began making contact with the wall as he tried to maintain the pace. With seven laps remaining, Larson finally retook the lead, leaving Briscoe to finish fourth behind Austin Cindric and Denny Hamlin. Briscoe pointed to a sudden change in the car’s handling after the race, while his crew chief James Small highlighted a more specific issue on the right side of the Toyota.
“It looks like we’ve got some damage there. The rock is all torn open. We’ve got some concrete or something stuck in there, so I’m sure that didn’t help either, but it is what it is,” Small told Matt Weaver after the race.
Small’s discovery of a torn rocker panel, the lower section of the car, helps explain what went wrong. Briscoe hit the outside wall several times, damaging the panel and affecting the car’s aerodynamics. Without it, the car lost some of the downforce it needed to keep the rear tires planted.
Briscoe had already acknowledged that the car became increasingly difficult to handle during that final stint. He told USA Sports.com (as reported by NASCAR.com) that his Toyota became “really, really, really free” and that he was effectively hanging on as the laps wound down.
When asked regarding anything that could have been changed with the car build or the final pit stop, the crew chief admitted that the outcome was disappointing but also said that Briscoe did well to keep the car under him.
“I haven’t spoken to him. I don’t know what he said. I’m sure he’s going to say he got it free, but yeah, maybe not get it free. He just managed to hang on there. So, yeah, it’s just a shame the way it ended,” Small said.
The handling issue was especially frustrating because Briscoe had looked faster than Larson earlier in the run. He caught Larson in traffic, only for the balance of the car to change once he got into clean air.
Small admitted there may have been some room for improvement in how the tires were managed, although he also pointed to the difficulty of balancing the car through traffic and clean air.
“Maybe a little bit. There’s a lot of input-related stuff. We’re doing a good job trying to manage him off of two and things like that. You can tell we’re being pretty aggressive there and trying to get back up to the five. It’s obviously always a little harder once you get clean air. It’s hard to manage the balance between traffic and clean air.”
Small also noted that the lapped cars were, to some extent, helping Briscoe, but the balance eventually shifted.
The collapse was especially costly given what was at stake for Briscoe. Entering Kansas, he needed something to keep his title hopes alive, and once Larson took the lead, he admitted he had gone into ‘desperation mode’. Larson did make contact with the No. 19 car to overtake the lead, and Briscoe could’ve returned the favor. But he never got the opportunity because of the damage on his race car.
“I just started kind of letting loose and just running as hard as I could, and got into the wall and obviously went from second to fourth,” Briscoe said as per NASCAR.com. “Just went into desperation mode, truthfully. I had to win to kind of stay in contention for the championship and came up short.”
Briscoe also believed he could have been more aggressive, as he added, “I could have, playing it back in my mind, been more aggressive with changing lanes and being unpredictable – kind of like he was doing when he had the lead. He was doing an amazing job. I was superior to him, and I couldn’t pass him.”
Briscoe finished fourth, losing 36 points to Larson, and he now trails behind the championship leader by 123 points, with six races left to decide the championship.
Small’s damage revelation adds another layer to what was already a frustrating Kansas finish. Briscoe had the pace to challenge Larson for the win, but a combination of tire management, an increasingly loose balance, and late-race damage ultimately left them watching another opportunity slip away.