Ford Performance Notes and Quotes
NASCAR XFINITY Series (NXS)
Thursday, August 13, 2020
Chase Briscoe, driver of the No. 98 HighPoint.com Ford Mustang in the NASCAR XFINITY Series, comes into this weekend’s Daytona Road Course race second in the point standings, trailing fellow Ford driver Austin Cindric by 11 points. He spoke about what to expect this weekend with members of the media via Zoom.
CHASE BRISCOE, No. 98 HighPoint.com Ford Mustang – YOU TOOK SOME VIRTUAL LAPS ON iRACING LAST NIGHT. WHAT DID YOU LEARN? “It was super-fun. It’s been really neat for me during this pandemic to see how much iRacing has grown in popularity and how it’s always something we’ve viewed as a teaching tool and now to see really the fans see the behind the scenes of how we get prepared week in and week out. It was super-fun. It was definitely a good learning experience. I felt like I learned a couple things about the racetrack and I’ve ran there in real life in some IMSA stuff, but it’s so opposite of all the stock car stuff, so just getting more laps, whether it’s seat time, on the sim in iRacing or on the sim at Ford Performance, I feel like it’s been a big help and hopefully that will correlate over to real life.”
LAST WEEK YOU POSTED YOU WANTED TO RACE IN A MONSOON. YOU MIGHT GET TO DO THAT THIS WEEKEND. HOW WOULD RAIN CHANGE A RACE ON THAT TRACK? “I would love to run in the rain. I thought the rain was super-fun at Road America. That was the first time I’d ever done it and it reminded me, truthfully, of a lot of the Eldora truck race just how you had to kind of drive it. So I thought it was really fun, first off, and I feel like Daytona would probably be the hardest place to run in the rain just because I don’t really know what the banking would do. A lot of the transitions are from the bank down to the flat, so there will be a ton of puddles there and what-not, so I don’t really know what to expect, but I would love to run the whole race in the rain. I think that would add another whole element to it. I just think it would be fun. I’m looking forward to going to Daytona. Anytime you’re in Daytona for four days there’s a pretty good chance it’s gonna rain, and I know there’s a 20-30 percent chance right now. That can change literally hour by the hour, so I don’t know what to expect down there, whether it’s rain or dry, but we’ll try to make the most of it either way and try to put on a really good show for the fans.”
HOW WILL THE CHICANE OFF TURN FOUR CHANGE THINGS? “It’s gonna change it a lot. Truthfully, last night on iRacing it was like 75 percent of laps I ran I would want to continue off turn four and then I would realize almost too late that, ‘Hey, I’ve got a left-hander now here where I didn’t have one before.’ I’m sure in real life it’ll be a little bit different, but if I’m in the lead it will probably catch me off guard, but if I see everybody slowing down in front of me, but you’re so used to whether it’s running the oval or running the road course, I’m just so used to running the bottom all the way through three and four and going on to the frontstretch, where now we’ve got to start on the bottom and kind of swing up and really probably the heaviest braking zone on the entire racetrack, so I don’t know what to expect with the chicane. I know it looks pretty narrow. It feels narrow in iRacing and on the Ford sim, but I think it’s definitely gonna create an element of excitement. Where before if you came off turn six, whichever one leads onto the big track, as long as you didn’t make a mistake in the bus stop, nobody was probably gonna pass you all the way back around to the flag stand. Now, if it’s a late-race situation, there’s gonna be some super-exciting moves made in that final chicane. NASCAR did a really good job with trying to make the most out of what they had as far as space relief in there. It’s really tight there and I think it’s gonna be really exciting to watch that chicane. I don’t think any of us know what to expect, especially that first lap, and a lot of eyes will be on that ARCA race just trying to figure out what to expect as far as how to make passes into there.”
ARE YOU LOOKING AT POINTS BECAUSE OF THE 15 BONUS POINTS AVAILABLE FOR WINNING THE REGULAR SEASON CHAMPIONSHIP? “Yeah, absolutely. That’s been all we’ve been focused on, really, since we won a couple races. We had a 30-something point lead until Kansas and Kansas we had just a terrible race and he swung, I think, 34 points on us and now we’ve been trying to play catch-up. Honestly, I think we all knew Cindric, when he passed us was gonna be hard to get back by just because of all the road racing we were going to do. You go to Richmond, a lot of places he’s really good at, but we’ve got to try to make the most out of it. I feel like at Road America we did a really good job. If he wins a stage, as long as I run second or if he wins the race and I run second, he’s accumulating more playoff points, but, at the same time, in the regular season we’re staying right there with him. I think at Road America we only lost three points to him and we had damage from lap one, so I thought we did a good job of salvaging the best we could. We just have to stay close. I think Dover is a great opportunity for us to try to swing back the other way and then the biggest thing is when we go to Daytona for the oval that can be a 40-point swing right away, so we’re just trying to stay as close as we can because those 15 bonus points are a huge deal. That’s like winning three more races and that can be the difference maker come playoff time.”
HOW DO YOU PREP FOR THE HEAT IN DAYTONA? “Drink a lot of water. I think that’s the best thing you can do. With hot temperatures means slick racetrack and that’s what I love when we go even oval racing or road racing. That’s a good thing to point out is I feel like Daytona road course-wise is probably the slickest racetrack we’ll go to on the road course. I at least have some experience there with the IMSA car, where other guys don’t have any laps around that place and don’t realize how slick it is in the infield and how much tire wear is gonna be an issue. You add 100-degree weather on top of that and it’s just gonna be worse for everybody in terms of trying to manage that grip, slipping and sliding around. It’s definitely gonna be a race where your balance is a big deal, a bigger deal than typically it is, where if you burn your tires off at Daytona on the road course, you’re gonna have a hard time making moves and catching guys. It’s something to keep in mind and the hot weather is certainly gonna be a factor in that, and that’s what’s gonna make it fun. If it rains, you’re gonna have a ton of balance issues and if it’s 100 degrees outside you’re gonna have a ton of balance issues, so I think this is gonna be an awesome race for us as well as all weekend.”
THAT TRACK WILL BE GREEN FOR YOU IN TERMS OF HAVING GOODYEAR TIRES ON THE TRACK. HOW DO YOU VIEW THAT CHALLENGE? “Yeah, for sure it is. That’s another thing to keep in mind. I’m not even sure how many laps that first stage is until the competition cautions, but it’s probably gonna take us really seven, eight, nine, ten laps to get that General rubber off the racetrack. You might think your car is loose or tight one way or the other and then once all that Goodyear rubber finally gets established, your car can do a total 180 and start driving totally different. That’s gonna be, I think, one thing to keep in mind. It’s gonna be hard for all of those drivers to kind of know, ‘Okay, what’s that rubber do for us on this track?’ We had a little bit of experience at Indy with the IndyCar rubber, but that’s totally different than General Tire rubber, so that’s something we’ll have to go back and look at our notes and try to see, ‘Okay, on the ovals is that something that typically happens?’ If we’re looser or tighter and try to keep that in mind for the road course.”
YOU’VE GOT TO BE HAVING FUN AT STEWART-HAAS WITH THE YEAR THE WHOLE ORGANIZATION IS HAVING, RIGHT? “Yeah, absolutely. It’s been a great year for the entire organization. We’ve been really good on the XFINITY side, but even on the Cup side with Harvick winning all the races he’s won. Cole winning his race. Almirola has been really fast all year long and Clint just last weekend was winning stages at Michigan and up front, so all five cars are in contention to win week in and week out and that’s all you can ask for as a driver is to be in the best race cars. I feel like Stewart-Haas gives all five of us the best each and every week.”
HOW MUCH VISIBILITY DO YOU NEED TO RACE IN THE RAIN AND WHEN DOES IT BECOME UNRACEABLE? “That’s one thing that I always wanted to race in the rain and last week I finally got to do that. I was blown away at how little visibility there was. Down the back straightaway there was a car probably three or four car lengths in front of me and I couldn’t even see his brake lights. Visibility is really hard. It kind of took me back to dirt racing days when we would run daytime races and it was so dusty you can’t see anything. One thing I would love to see NASCAR do is put a mud flap type thing on the back of the car for rain conditions just because it would knock more of that water straight down. I feel like us race car drivers could see a lot better because right now it sprays the roose so high up in the air and then it just falls so slow that it’s almost like a fog and you just can’t see anything, where I feel like if we had mud flaps, as weird as that sounds, behind the rear tires I feel like that would change everything. I don’t know if that’s something they’ve looked into before or not, but I feel like that would make it a total game-changer. I think it would make the racing on TV easier to watch. I know watching Road America back it’s hard to even see the cars on TV and from the driver’s seat it’s really hard to see as well. Maybe they’ll find something that we can do down the road, but, truthfully, we don’t have a ton of races in the rain so it’s really not that big of an issue until it is one, so, Daytona, I don’t know. I think the roose is only going to be worse because we’re going so much faster and that just typically makes it worse, so we’ll see but it was definitely hard to see at Road America for sure.”
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE IN DIFFICULTY TO SEE ON A ROAD COURSE VERSUS IF YOU’RE IN TURN THREE OR FOUR OF THE OVAL AT DAYTONA? “It’s different. Without the rain, the sun is really bright in Daytona and you can’t really see anything either, but it’s so blinding that you can still make out the cars that are around you. But when it’s in the rain, you literally can’t see anything. You’re going off, honestly, the green light, at least of me, in a lot of the corners is what I was going off of. Once you got within a car length of a car you could see him, but up until that point you couldn’t see anything. The daytime stuff at Daytona in three and four, you’re in the pack and a lot of the time you can look in your rearview mirror and judge where you’re at on the racetrack relative to other cars, and in the rain you can’t do that because you look in the rearview mirror you can’t see anything either. It makes it really tough. That would be one thing I’d love to see is something we can do to make it a little bit easier to see in the rain, but it’s probably easier said than done. It’s definitely a challenge, but it’s a challenge for each and every one of us. A perfect example is at Road America I told my crew chief that anything he could do to get me in the lead I felt like I would go almost a second or a second-and-a-lap faster just because I could see where I was going. It’s definitely and issue and it will be at Daytona if it rains as well.”
YOUR DAD POSTED ON SOCIAL MEDIA THIS WEEK THAT HE HAD A MEDICAL ISSUE. HOW IS HE AND HOW HAS IT BEEN NOT HAVING HIM AT THE TRACK THIS YEAR? “He’s doing good. It’s been tough on him not just going to the racetrack. He’s used to going week in and week out, especially with the success that we’ve been having this year. My entire family, Marissa as well, it’s been hard on all of them to not be there for all the wins, but he had been feeling where anytime he really did anything physical he just started getting real short of breath and his arm would start going numb and he would start sweating. So he went to the doctor and just told him what was going on and they decided to do a heart cath on him and they got in there and he had two arteries that, I guess, were like 99 percent blocked and he was just a heart attack waiting to happen. It was a blessing in disguise that he went to the doctor and that they found it before and they gave him two stints. Yesterday was the first day since he had the surgery and he said he felt better already, so it’s only gonna get better and better. Hopefully, this will be something that will let him feel better for a lot longer time and hopefully lose some of his weight that he’s got and get him back to the racetrack.”
ARE YOU SAYING THE RAIN IS LIKE A SAFETY ISSUE OR THAT IT’S JUST UNCOMFORTABLE AND A CHALLENGE? “I don’t think it’s dangerous. I mean, we’re going slower in the rain than we are anywhere else, so I don’t think danger is really an issue. It makes you on your toes, but it’s no different to me if we’re in the pack at Daytona or Talladega To me, that’s way scarier than running in the rain with limited visibility, and, like I said, dirt racing we would have a couple later daytime races and it would be so dusty you couldn’t even see past your hood. So, it takes me back a lot to those times. I think it’s harder for some of the pavement guys maybe that never ran dirt because visibility has never really been an issue for them, but it’s definitely something that can get looked at, but it’s only gonna make it easier and I don’t know if that’s necessarily better. I think that’s one of the things with rain racing is visibility is an issue. I think it would be different if we were in an open-wheel car, where it’s easier to just drive in the back of somebody and take off flipping or something like that, but with the speeds we’re going in the rain if you misjudge something and get into somebody, it’s not like it’s gonna really honestly even ruin your day just because of how slow we’re going into some of those corners in the rain. So, yeah, I think it would be nice from my end at least to be able to see a little bit better, but it’s not like we have zero visibility whatsoever. You can see a little bit and that makes it fun and exciting.”
