Chase Briscoe is ready for a bittersweet weekend at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
“I’m excited,” Briscoe said of NASCAR competing on the oval. “It’s going to be cool. The fact that I get to run a Brickyard 400 is really special, and to do it with how everything has played out with Stewart-Haas Racing shutting down means a lot to me getting to do it at least once in the 14 car.
“I cried at the driver intro ride-around deal at the road course. I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like at the Brickyard.”
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The last time a Cup Series race was run on the Indianapolis oval was in 2020, and it was without fans in the stands because of the pandemic. A year later, with its intermediate competition lacking and road courses in favor, NASCAR moved both the Cup Series and the Xfinity Series events to the Indianapolis road course in 2021.
Briscoe moved into the series as a rookie with Stewart-Haas that same year. An Indiana native (Mitchell), Briscoe grew up watching and attending races at Indianapolis. He plans to return home well before the weekend starts to see family and Friday, Briscoe will run a sprint car race at the same track he went to every Friday night as a kid.
“I haven’t raced there in 10 [plus] years,” Briscoe said. “So, it’s going to be a cool weekend in general to run the sprint car at Bloomington and then also get to knock off a bucket list thing in the Brickyard 400.”
It hasn’t been lost on Briscoe that his first oval race at Indianapolis will be the first and last time he drives the No. 14 car at the speedway. Briscoe idolized Tony Stewart as a young driver, and Stewart is now his car owner, having hand-picked Briscoe to drive the No. 14 Ford Mustang.
“It is cool and it’s special,” Briscoe said. “That was something that didn’t even hit me until the week after the announcement came out. We were doing an interview with IMS and they mentioned that this would be the only time I would get to run 14 there, and I didn’t even think about it. I got emotional thinking about it even then, and I talked to Tony about a week or two after, and I said, ‘Hey, I just did this interview the other week. This is going to be the last time the 14 with you owning it runs at Indy,’ and I could tell it kind of hit him, too. He didn’t really think about that.
“It’s going to be a special weekend. It’s going to be a sad weekend, truthfully, but it is special. As a kid, if you had told me I get to run a Brickyard 400 driving for Tony Stewart, I would have never believed it. It’s definitely a cool opportunity. It’s something that I’m going to make sure I get a lot of pictures of — and hopefully, a lot of pictures kissing the bricks at the end.”
Stewart relates to Briscoe’s enthusiasm about the weekend ahead. The two-time Indianapolis winner sees all of the connections and finds it fitting that it all comes together this year.
“There’s a lot of tradition there,” Stewart said. “A.J. [Foyt] was my hero, and Chase says that I was his hero, which kind of completes the circle of how special Indy is and how special the 14 is to us. I’m excited for him. This isn’t going to be his last one [but] it is going to be our last one.”