Briscoe, the Cup Series’ 2021 rookie of the year, struggled with a very up-and-down first fulltime season, in part due to a company-wide downtown in performance by his entire Stewart-Haas Racing organization.
The debut this season of the Next Gen car added big question marks for everyone but Briscoe’s No. 14 Ford team appeared to come out of the gate strong.
He led more laps in the season’s race of the season at Fontana (20) than he did his entire rookie season and then shined at Phoenix in race No. 4, where he led 101 laps and earned his first series victory.
Briscoe, 27, rocketed to as high as third in the standings following his 15th-place finish at Atlanta but other than a strong run at the Bristol Dirt Race – where he contended for the win – his best run since has been 13th and he’s dropped to 13th in points.
Briscoe’s diagnosis isn’t so much that his team is suddenly doing things wrong, but more that it isn’t doing them exactly right.
Where did the pace go?
“This car it seems like is so temperamental. For us, on the No. 14 car, I felt like we were one of the top five cars the first four or five weeks of the season,” Briscoe said. “Now, we’re struggling to even run 15th.
“This car is just so hit-or-miss and when everybody has the same stuff, if you miss it by one thing, that’s the difference between running fifth and running 20th. I think right now there are only a couple teams that have really hit on something, that continue to do the same thing week-in and week-out and have found speed.
“It’s kind of interesting thing because when everyone had an open playbook, you could go build whatever or go find whatever (to get better). It made it a little easier if you had an advantage to be way better than everybody else. Now, everybody’s on the same playing field and those advantages are now really, really small.”
The changes in performance for Briscoe’s No. 14 team don’t seem to be attributed to the race tracks which…
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