LAS VEGAS – Chase Briscoe “could taste it.”
After going a lap down in the first stage of Sunday’s (Oct. 16) NASCAR Cup playoff race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Briscoe thought he was within reach of winning his way into the Championship 4.
On a restart with 35 laps to go, the only obstacle in front of him was the No. 31 of Justin Haley, who was on two fresh tires in a pit strategy bid to win the South Point 400.
“I was kind of just making him burn his stuff up and we’d had such a big gap on the guys behind us I was trying to make him make a mistake,” Briscoe said. “I kind of found something in (turns) 3 and 4 and I felt like I was probably 3 laps away from passing him.”
But then…
“You can’t control the cautions.”
There were two in the final 35 laps.
With 27 laps left, Daniel Suarez went for a spin off Turn 4 after being cutoff by Tyler Reddick. Then with 22 laps to go, Landon Cassill spun in Turn 3.
“If the (first) caution doesn’t come out when I was running behind (Haley) I was pretty confident I was gonna win the race,” Briscoe said after he placed fourth for his fifth top five of the season.
Two things happened under the final set of cautions that spelled doom for Briscoe’s chances at his second career Cup Series win.
Under the first, Joey Logano led a group of cars onto pit road. With fresh tires, which Briscoe didn’t know about, Logano restarted 13th.
Then on the last restart, Ross Chastain elected to restart third in the bottom lane in the row behind Briscoe and Haley.
“When (Chastain) picked the bottom, I knew I was probably going to put three-wide and that was the thing that killed me,” Briscoe said.
That’s exactly what happened on the restart, as Chastain squeezed by Briscoe and Haley in Turn 3.
“Between me, (Chastain) and (Haley), whoever got the lead was going to be able to kind of drive away just because this car seems like if you’re that front car you can just haul the mail,” Briscoe said. “When (Chastain) got the lead, I knew I was pretty much done from trying to win the race probably. (Logano), I didn’t realize he was on fresh tires at the time. So he got to me, I just let him go and hoped and kind of like me at Bristol (dirt in the spring), like hopefully they go up there and they would wreck each other and I would get lucky.”
Instead of getting lucky, Logano passed Chastain cleanly with three laps to go and ran off to the win and clinch a berth in the Championship…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Frontstretch…