Seven laps. That is how close Chase Briscoe came to a win that could have changed his whole Chase. On Sunday at Kansas Speedway, he started 23rd and spent the afternoon slicing through traffic while Kyle Larson ran away with the race. Larson led 235 of the 267 laps. Then Briscoe caught him. He took the lead on Lap 238 and held it for 23 laps. His No. 19 Toyota got loose, Larson slipped by, and Briscoe scraped the wall on his way to fourth. Looking at the points, it seems like the title is getting out of reach for the No. 19 team, but Briscoe remains optimistic, speaking on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.

Briscoe opened with this: “I feel really good about our team. You know, I feel like our speed’s been great.”

That sounds like spin from a driver this far back. Kansas makes it far from a laughing matter. Weather wiped out qualifying, so Briscoe started 23rd. He worked through traffic, ran Larson down after the last green-flag stops and took the lead. But in clean air, the No. 19 car lost the balance, allowing Larson to side draft and bag the win.

The points tell the rest. Larson won both stages, took the fastest-lap bonus, and scored 76 points, the first maximum under the new 2026 scoring. Briscoe scored 40. As things stand, Briscoe is staring at cutting a 123-point deficit, with the hopes of leaders having a bad race to be in the title hunt.

Kansas was not the first time this Chase took something from him. At Darlington Raceway on Sept. 6, Briscoe led 30 laps and finished sixth after teammate Christopher Bell took the lead on fresher tires. A week later, World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway threw 18 cautions at the field. Briscoe was running sixth late when Chase Elliott’s brake rotor failed, and Elliott’s car hit his. He finished 32nd and scored nine points.

Bristol Motor Speedway was different because that one was on him. He was near the top five when he hit the wall with six laps to go. The contact broke a toe link and dropped him to 27th. Briscoe did not dodge it: “I just made a math mistake with five or six to go trying to gain a position.” After three races his average finish was 21.7, which ranked 14th among the 16 Chase drivers.

He summed it up by saying, “So it’s just not been great execution.”

Poor execution can be fixed. A slow car cannot. That is the heart of his case, and it leads him to look at another driver. Briscoe went looking for proof that big leads can shrink, and he found it close to home.

“I was actually looking before we got on here just to see what Tyler Reddick’s advantage was going into week seven of the season,” he said. “He was, I think, 98 points ahead of second place.”

Reddick’s 2026 season gives Briscoe a much stronger precedent than the roughly 98-point figure he remembered. Tyler Reddick’s lead over Denny Hamlin actually reached 129 points during the regular season. At that point, the cushion looked almost impossible to overcome.

Hamlin did it anyway. He won three straight races at Nashville Superspeedway, Michigan International Speedway and Pocono Raceway, while Reddick finished 25th or worse six times in nine races. By late July, Hamlin led by 68 points. That was a 197-point swing in the standings.

Reddick finished the regular season 133 points behind Hamlin. Hamlin took the No. 1 seed, while Reddick entered the Chase as the No. 3 seed. That is the part of Briscoe’s comparison that matters, because a lead that looked safe did not survive.

The exact figures Briscoe remembered were a little lower. Reddick led by 95 points after six races and by 82 after seven. Reddick drives the No. 45 Toyota for 23XI Racing. He won the Daytona 500 and took five of the first nine races. Then he averaged only 17.5 points a race over six races.

A Michigan restart crash, a tire problem while he fought for the win at Naval Base Coronado, and mechanical trouble at Sonoma Raceway and Chicagoland Speedway did the damage. Reddick now sits seventh in the Chase, 111 points behind Larson.

To be fair, Reddick never erased a 123-point Chase deficit. His season only shows how fast points can move. Briscoe also has his own proof that this team can recover. He was 33rd in the standings after four races this year, then won at Chicagoland in July for his sixth career victory. Small’s early pit call that day jumped him ahead of William Byron. Briscoe also finished third in the 2025 championship, so this is no fluke team.

The format helps him more than it would have in recent years. Nobody gets eliminated, and all 10 races feed one total. A win is worth 55 points, and stage points and the fastest lap add more. Briscoe knows that a win without stage points can be almost a wash. So he wants everything: “go and just try to get as many stage points as we can and win as many races as we can.”

Still, the man in front is not helping. Larson has finished fifth, first, second, and first so far, an average of 2.25, the best four-race start in Chase history. Briscoe admits as much: “So you’re gonna have to have a lot of attrition to kind of overcome that kind of a points deficit.” Attrition means the leaders crash, break down, or make mistakes. Talladega Superspeedway on Oct. 25 is the most likely place for that. Briscoe does not pretend otherwise.

“So it’s probably, I mean, nearly impossible, but it is not impossible,” he said.

Las Vegas Motor Speedway comes next on Oct. 4. If the No. 19 team finally turns its speed into points, Briscoe will be in the fight. If it does not, Kansas will be the race he thinks about all winter.