If it could go wrong, it pretty much has gone wrong for Chase Briscoe in the early part of the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series season.
On the heels of a head-turning 2025 when he reached the Championship 4 and earned career highs in race wins (three), poles (seven) and laps led (884), the second-year driver of the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota has fallen on hard times.
So, what exactly has been plaguing Briscoe this year? In short: A little bit of everything.
Chase Briscoe Laments Disappointing Start to 2026
Since snagging a front-row starting spot for the Daytona 500 for the second consecutive year, Briscoe has had very little to celebrate. After leading 23 laps in The Great American Race, Briscoe limped home with a torn-up race car and a 36th-place finish.
The following weekend, at EchoPark Speedway (formerly Atlanta Motor Speedway,) Briscoe fared far better, finishing a close second to race winner Tyler Reddick. But falling short of the win was nevertheless a letdown for the second-year JGR driver, especially after leading 27 laps and being firmly in the hunt for the big trophy.
“I was able to, obviously, push the 45 (Reddick) to the win,” Briscoe said immediately after the race. “Wish I would have been able to have a bigger run to take it three wide and take the lead. But I just couldn’t do it, for whatever reason.
“I would say the one thing that our car lacked all day was the straightaway speed. It drove good. And I could make moves. But it felt like I was slow down the straightaway. Not sure really what else I could have done, truthfully.”
The disappointment of finishing second in Atlanta paled in comparison to the frustration of the next two weekends, however, when Briscoe posted back-to-back 37th-place finishes at Circuit of The Americas and Phoenix Raceway. In the former event, a broken transaxle on his car proved to be his undoing.
“Went to shift, and it was like I was in neutral and it was trying to spin the one side and not the other,” Briscoe said after recording his first DNF of 2026. “It’s really unfortunate. Felt like we were good enough to win, truthfully, (and had a) top-five car pretty easily. Just frustrating.”
At Phoenix, Briscoe fell victim to a hard crash well before the midway point of the race. The result was another DNF, this one relegating him all the way to 33rd in the standings.
“Just par for the course for how this year started,” Briscoe said after retiring from the event with a tire failure that sent his car into the wall. “It was another car that was extremely fast. Felt like we were certainly going to be in contention for the win and just another failure for us. Definitely frustrating.”
Perhaps Slowly Turning the Corner, Chase Briscoe Still Faces Uphill Climb
Reeling from his consecutive 37th-place finishes and DNFs, Briscoe broke out of his funk with a solid eighth-place finish at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on March 15. But even outcome that proved to be bittersweet.
Had Briscoe not been hit with multiple penalties, including one for speeding on pit road, he might have wound up in Victory Lane.
“We just had a really, really good car,” the driver of the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota said. “I would have loved to not have sped on pit road and bury us, because I felt like we could have been in the mix. Just have to clean up my part.
“You can’t be making those mistakes at the Cup level. It takes you out of a race.”
Since bagging his second top-10 of the season, Briscoe has finished 12th (Darlington Raceway) and 14th (Martinsville Speedway). Heading into the NASCAR Cup Series’ first off weekend of 2026, Briscoe sits 21st in the standings. He’s five positions to the bad of playoff eligibility.
So, to return to the playoffs, much less make a championship run, he has a lot of work to do. That’s particularly true under this year’s new championship format, which rewards consistency over winning.
Can Briscoe bounce back and again be a title contender? The next few weeks will offer some major clues as to the answer.
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