It didn’t take place at a Chick-fil-A this time, but Chase Briscoe and Richard Boswell had to have a familiar conversation this week.
A frustrating night at Richmond Raceway last weekend led to tense exchanges between Briscoe and his crew chief on the Stewart-Haas Racing team radio.
Briscoe wasn’t happy with his race car. Boswell wanted him to focus on driving. During one discussion about their approach to the race, Briscoe was told the team could try something different or run 30th.
“I felt like it was pretty normal for how me and Boswell are [with each other],” Briscoe said Saturday at Martinsville Speedway about the interactions. “There was a little more frustration [at Richmond]. It’s funny, this week we sat down and talked for almost an hour just like, look, I need you to do this different, and he kind of told me things he feels I need to do different.
“Truthfully, I just kind of told him, ‘Would you talk to Kevin Harvick that way?’ We need to find a happy medium of where we’re at now, and what would you do if you had a Hall of Famer driving the car? Obviously, I’m not a Hall of Famer, but I’m also not a rookie. I know what I’m doing at this point, so I thought we had a really good conversation.”
It wasn’t the first time they had to hash things out. Briscoe and Boswell spent two seasons together in the Xfinity Series, winning seven races and finishing in the top five in points. The two were reunited in the Cup Series last season when Briscoe’s team made a change.
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“In the Xfinity Series, the first year, we…not butted heads, but we just didn’t have that chemistry, and we did the same thing,” Briscoe said. “We had like an hourlong conversation and that’s when we started winning all the races. It was kind of one of those coming to Jesus moments again for us, and we kind of joked about it, too, because we did the last one at Chick-fil-A.
“He told me earlier this week, ‘Do we need to go to Chick-fil-A again?’ So, yeah, we talked it out and it was good. I’m looking forward to this week and seeing how it goes.”
Briscoe is 18th in the championship standings going into Sunday’s Cook Out 400 (3 p.m. ET, FS1). He’s led one lap, has four stage points and has two top-10 finishes. In the last three races, Briscoe hasn’t finished higher than 13th.
“Up to the last two weeks, I’d grade us a B or B minus,” Briscoe said. “Then, the last two weeks, we’ve been at a C minus. We just haven’t been very good the last two weeks. I don’t know really what it was to account for that. Richmond has been a place we’ve been very good in the past and we just tried something different, and it wasn’t very good. We tried to copy what we did at Phoenix, which was fairly good, and it didn’t correlate over and we haven’t been good the last two weeks. So, I don’t know.
“We’re definitely way better than where we were last year, but our expectations are just way higher this year, so now that we’ve struggled, it’s been a little frustrating. But I would still say we’re in a really good spot. That’s the encouraging thing. Even last week, we ran absolutely terrible and we still [finished] 18th. Last year, we did everything perfect, and it was like we ran 25th, so we know that we have more speed in our cars and things like that, but we need to clean up a lot of things. Even last week, our pit stops weren’t very good, and we have one of the top five pit crews on pit road. We just didn’t have a very good week altogether. So, hopefully, we can clean it up this week.”
Briscoe was the highest qualifying Ford driver at Martinsville Speedway. He’ll roll off Sunday from the fifth position, his best qualifying effort of the season.