● The Hollywood Casino 400 NASCAR Cup Series race is this Sunday at Kansas Speedway in Kansas City, and in addition to watching Chase Briscoe wheel his No. 14 Mahindra Tractors Ford Mustang Dark Horse, perhaps it’s time to bet on Briscoe. After earning his playoff spot with the equivalent of a walk-off home run Sept. 1 at Darlington (S.C.) Raceway when he won the Cook Out Southern 500, Briscoe has since outshined four other playoff participants by advancing to the Round of 12. Even after finishing dead last in the playoff opener Sept. 8 at Atlanta Motor Speedway, Briscoe rebounded the following week at Watkins Glen (N.Y.) International when he finished a best-in-class sixth. The next-best playoff driver was 10th-place Austin Cindric, as 14 of the 16 original playoff drivers finished outside of the top-10. Briscoe then went into the elimination race last Saturday night at Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway with a six-point buffer over the top-12 cutoff. Five hundred laps later, Briscoe was on to the Round of 12 with a solid eighth-place drive. The guy many had written off before the playoffs even started is now a bona fide playoff contender. So if you’re in the Hollywood Casino this weekend on the backstretch at Kansas and you amble up to the roulette table, put some money on red No. 14. It’s bound to pay off.
● The Hollywood Casino 400 will be Briscoe’s eighth career NASCAR Cup Series start at Kansas. While Briscoe is still looking for his first top-10 finish at the 1.5-mile oval, he has been quietly consistent, with four finishes of 21st or better, and only one result outside the top-25. Briscoe’s best Cup Series finish at Kansas is 13th, earned in September 2022.
● Briscoe’s Kansas record in the NASCAR Xfinity Series was a study in improvement – specifically, rapid improvement. After finishing 30th in his first Xfinity Series race at Kansas in October 2018, Briscoe returned to the track the following October and finished an impressive third after leading twice for 33 laps. He finished 14th in July 2020 but then roared back three months later to utterly dominate. In his final Xfinity Series start at Kansas in October 2020, Briscoe led four times for a race-high 159 laps – all but 41 of the race’s 200 laps. He finished 1.199 seconds ahead of runner-up Daniel Hemric to take the last of his 11 career Xfinity Series victories.
● Briscoe has made two NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series starts at Kansas. He finished fifth in his first Truck Series race at the track in May 2017 and in his return to Kansas four years later, he finished 19th (May 2021).
● Briscoe’s epic run to the 2016 ARCA Menards Series title ended with a mic drop at Kansas. Having already sewn up the series title before the last race of the year at Kansas, Briscoe went into the series finale and made that race a microcosm of his season. He won the pole, led twice for a race-high 67 laps (all but 33 of the race’s 100 laps) and then won the race with a 1.464-second advantage over runner-up Austin Cindric. It was Briscoe’s sixth win of the season and he padded his championship tally to an eye-popping 5,290 points, which was 535 points more than his nearest pursuer, Tom Hessert III. In that title-winning season, Briscoe’s average start across 20 races was 4.1 and his average finish was 5.2 with a total of 949 laps led.
● Riding along with Briscoe in the Hollywood Casino 400 is Heath Dodson. Via a decal over the passenger-side window of Briscoe’s No. 14 Ford Mustang Dark Horse, Dodson’s cancer battle is being highlighted by the Martin Truex Jr. Foundation’s and the NASCAR Foundation’s Honor a Cancer Hero program. Diagnosed with esophageal cancer in December 2023, Dodson underwent radiation and chemotherapy this spring. More recently, he had an esophagectomy. Even with all of this adversity, Dodson remains strong and resilient in his cancer battle. He was nominated for the Honor a Cancer Hero program by Jonathan Haggarty.
● Mahindra Ag North America is a proud sponsor of Briscoe and Stewart-Haas Racing, and 2024 highlights an impressive milestone for Mahindra – 30 years of selling tractors in the United States. Houston-based Mahindra Ag North America is part of Mahindra Group’s Automotive and Farm Sector, the No. 1-selling farm tractor company in the world, based on volumes across all company brands. Mahindra offers a range of tractor models from 20-75 horsepower, implements, and the ROXOR heavy-duty UTV. Mahindra farm equipment is engineered to be easy to operate by first-time tractor or side-by-side owners and heavy duty to tackle the tough jobs of rural living, farming and ranching. Steel-framed Mahindra Tractors and side-by-sides are ideal for customers who demand performance, reliability and comfort. Mahindra dealers are independent, family-owned businesses located throughout the U.S. and Canada.
Chase Briscoe, Driver of the No. 14 Mahindra Tractors Ford Mustang Dark Horse
Back-to-back top-10s propelled you into the Round of 12. Is it time for people to start taking you and the No. 14 team seriously in this year’s playoffs?
“I don’t think anyone believes us, but I really think we can battle for the championship, and I think these last two weeks show that. I mean, we gave ’em a race, right? We went to Atlanta and got one point. At Bristol, we had a lot of adversity and we were better than eighth place. We’ve brought top-five racecars to the track the last four weeks and we’re hitting our stride at the right time. And with this format, if you can just be good for 10 weeks, then you can be a champion, and I feel like we’re as strong as any team right now.”
Intermediate-style tracks are the bread and butter of the NASCAR Cup Series, with Kansas the first of three intermediate tracks in this season’s last seven races. How have intermediates been for you this year and what are your expectations for the Hollywood Casino 400?
“It’s definitely the bread and butter of what NASCAR is, as far as how the schedule goes. I think this year we’ve come a long way on our mile-and-a-half program. At the beginning of the year, I felt like we were probably one of the stronger Fords. And then over the course of the summer, everybody else kind of caught up. But I still feel good about it. Intermediates are probably our weakest style of track, but it’s still a track where I feel like we can go to and run well. We’ve always been able to qualify really well on them. We have the speed, we just have to put the balance together for the race.”
The spring race at Kansas produced the closest finish in NASCAR history when Kyle Larson beat Chris Buescher by .001 of a second. Is this a result of the NextGen car and how it’s made everyone run so closely with one another?
“Yeah, it’s definitely different than what we’ve seen in the past. Just how the NextGen car races, it kind of creates a lot of opportunities for just really close, side-by-side racing on mile-and-a-half racetracks. And you obviously see that now when we go to places like Kansas and Michigan and all these kind of tracks. This car thrives on those types of racetracks, and I think that’s why you see these super-close finishes on them.”
What do you need to be fast and consistent throughout a race at Kansas?
“First off, your car just has to have good speed. It has to drive good. It’s a place where just the raw speed of the car is a big deal. As a driver, it’s hard to really carry it a ton there. At a place like Darlington or Homestead, the slick, worn-out racetracks, the driver can probably make up a few more positions than at a place like Kansas just because the raw speed of the car is really, really important there. When I think of Kansas, I think your car has to have good speed. It has to have good balance because you have to be extremely aggressive, and you just have to be really good on restarts. If you can have good restarts and gain a lot of spots, it just completely changes the complexion of your race. Where, if you’re battling on restarts there, it’s just easy to lose a lot of spots because the restarts are always so chaotic. Those are the things that typically stand out when I think about Kansas.”
The Kansas layout looks simple, but is that simplicity a bit deceptive when it comes to turning consistently fast laps?
“Kansas is fairly simple. Out of all the mile-and-a-halves that we go to, I would say in some ways it’s probably the least technical, but in other ways it’s one of the more technical tracks, just because it seems like for whatever reason, especially the last couple of years, Kansas has become a track where everybody runs on the fence. So it’s really, really hard to pass there. Your car does have to be really balanced there just to be able to pass anybody and not get tight behind guys. Any time you run the fence, there’s a technical aspect to it, but at the same time, it’s so high-speed, it’s not like we’re in there doing a lot of stuff with the pedals, but there’s a lot of commitment that comes with that as far as understanding the downforce and where you put your car compared to others. And the other thing that’s really hard about Kansas is just the wind. It seems like that racetrack, more than anywhere we go, your car drives totally different on one end than the other just because of the direction of the wind and how windy it is when we’re there.”
Kansas is another track where you had success in the Xfinity Series. In fact, you ended your career in the series there with a win. What made Kansas work for you in an Xfinity Series car?
“We just had really good stuff, truthfully. I think anybody could’ve driven that thing to win when we won there in the playoffs. I don’t know how many laps we led, but it felt like we led every single one of them. Our stuff was just extremely good, and that’s what it takes at Kansas. It’s one of those places where you’re only going to go as fast as your car allows. It’s a place where the driver, out of all the mile-and-a-halves, probably makes the least amount of difference just because it is so fast. (Kevin) Harvick said all the time, ‘You can’t make a slow car go fast,’ and that’s the truth when you go to Kansas. If your car’s not nearly perfect, it’s going to be a long day for you. So, hopefully, we can take what we’ve learned this year and apply it to Kansas. I feel like at Texas our car was 85 percent, 90 percent close to being perfect, so I feel like we’re right on that window of finding what perfect is, as close as you can be to that. You’re never 100 percent, but you can get to 98, 99 percent, and if we can do that, then we can go to Kansas and run well.”
How much different is a NASCAR Cup Series car at Kansas compared to what you were used to when you were there in an Xfinity Series car?
“The NextGen car is kind of different everywhere. The biggest thing when you got to the Cup Series is that, in Xfinity, there are probably only two or three guys whose cars are really, really good and the rest were way off. And if you got to Kansas and you were off, you were way off. But you get to the Cup Series, there are now 25 guys whose cars drive pretty dang good. It just makes it way tougher.”
Your introduction to Kansas was pretty amazing. In the ARCA race in 2016, you won the pole, led 67 of 100 laps, won the race, and that was during a dominating ARCA season. How big of a deal was that win and that kind of domination when you’re really trying to stake your claim to being a professional racecar driver?
“It was huge. ARCA finished their season at Kansas when I was racing there, and we were able to wrap up the championship before even going to Kansas that year. When you already have won the championship, you want to go out winning the race, right? We went in there, sat on the pole and won the race. It was cool. I knew when I ran that race it was probably going to be the last ARCA race I would ever run, so you want to go out on top. But also, I didn’t have anything for sure going into 2017. I was obviously talking to a couple of Truck teams, and when I won that race, that was finally when Ford came and said, ‘Hey, we want you to drive next year for us.’ So it was a big deal to win there and I think about it every time I go back, even though it was eight or so years ago now. That’s kind of where it all started, in a sense. After that weekend was when I finally signed my Ford contract, so it’s always cool to go back.”
● Event: Hollywood Casino 400 (Round 30 of 36)
● Time/Date: 3 p.m. EDT on Sunday, Sept. 29
● Location: Kansas Speedway in Kansas City
● Layout: 1.5-mile oval
● Laps/Miles: 267 laps/400.5 miles
● Stage Lengths: Stage 1: 80 laps / Stage 2: 85 laps / Final Stage: 102 laps
● TV/Radio: USA / MRN / SiriusXM NASCAR Radio
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