HighPoint.com Driver Looking to Make Some Noise and Climb in Championship Standings
- Event: Richmond 400 (Round 7 of 36)
- Time/Date: 7 p.m. EDT on Sunday, March 31
- Location: Richmond (Va.) Raceway
- Layout: .75-mile oval
- Laps/Miles: 400 laps/300 miles
- Stage Lengths: Stage 1: 70 laps / Stage 2: 160 laps / Final Stage: 170 laps
- TV/Radio: FOX / MRN / SiriusXM NASCAR Radio
Chase Briscoe comes into Richmond (Va.) Raceway on a streak of quiet consistency that emulates his overall history at the .75-mile oval.
The driver of the No. 14 HighPoint.com Ford Mustang Dark Horse for Stewart-Haas Racing has had three straight finishes of 13th or better. He finished a season-best ninth March 10 at Phoenix Raceway and 13th March 17 at Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway before earning another 13th-place drive last Sunday at Circuit of the Americas (COTA) in Austin, Texas.
The runs have placed Briscoe a respectable 17th in the championship standings, just three points and one position away from the top-16 – the cutoff spot for the 10-race championship, which is still 20 races away.
In the marathon that is the NASCAR Cup Series, consistency is key, and just as Briscoe has shown top-15 reliability in the early races of 2024, he’s been similarly reliable at Richmond across both the top-echelon Cup Series and the stepping-stone NASCAR Xfinity Series.
Sunday’s Cup Series race at Richmond will mark Briscoe’s seventh career Cup start at the track. He has three finishes of 12th or better, including a pair of 11th-place drives, the most recent of which came last July in the series’ prior visit to Richmond. And in five career Xfinity Series starts at Richmond between 2018 and 2020, Briscoe finished outside the top-16 only once, with three results of 11th or better. His best run came in September 2019, when he started fifth and finished fifth.
“Richmond’s been a place where we’ve been OK,” Briscoe said. “We haven’t been great, but we definitely haven’t been terrible. I think we’ll be in the mix. If we can get our car a little bit better, then we’ll be right where we need to be. We’ve been able to run in the top-five up there, just haven’t been able to get that little bit extra that we need, so hopefully this time we’ll be able to do that.”
Briscoe takes to the Richmond oval for practice at 10:30 a.m. EDT on Saturday which is immediately followed by qualifying at 11:15 a.m. He’ll then wait until the sun goes down on Sunday night for the 7 p.m. start of the Richmond 400, broadcast live on FOX and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.
