- Briscoe finished second to Hamlin for second year in a row at Dover.
- Yet he still didn’t hold any grudge against his Joe Gibbs teammate.
- Chris Gayle details what led to Hamlin’s dramatic win at Dover.
Chase Briscoe came up short against Denny Hamlin at Dover Motor Speedway last weekend.
It was the second straight year Briscoe had to settle for second place behind the same driver, and much like last season, the closing laps turned into a tug-of-war that saw the two Joe Gibbs Racing teammates swap the lead before crossing the line first and second.
Still, Briscoe left Dover without carrying a grudge. If anything, he viewed the duel as another lesson from one of the sport’s masters of racecraft.
Chase Briscoe appreciates teammate Denny Hamlin
Chase Briscoe remains pinned near the playoff cut line, making every point-paying opportunity matter. That is what made Dover sting even more. The All-Star Race carried no championship points, meaning the difference between first and second amounted to little more than a one-million-dollar swing.
Briscoe had Hamlin covered on the final restart, but the lead slipped through his fingers before the checkered flag waved. As Briscoe himself admitted afterward, he “can’t wake up tomorrow saying, ‘I feel like a million bucks.’ One spot short today, P2.”
Speaking after the race, Briscoe broke down the chase that haunted the No. 19 car throughout the final runs. Briscoe explained,
“Any time I would get the lead on a restart, I would just be so loose that I would burn my right-rear tire off. On the long run, I would just be hanging on. I almost needed to be second for those first 30-40 laps of a run. But if you can take the lead, you have to take it. I just needed a little bit of rear grip.”
Once Hamlin reclaimed the lead with roughly 30 laps remaining, the clock became Briscoe’s enemy. Across a marathon race that included two 75-lap segments and a final 200-lap stretch, the No. 19 team simply ran out of road before it could mount another charge.
“I thought, if I could do it all over again, I don’t know if I would have just gotten second and kind of followed behind him and played the long game just because I just would literally burn the right tire off of it, even trying to take it as easy as I could. I was so loose in clean air.”
He also mentioned, “So, yeah, definitely any time you can race around Denny, you learn a lot. He’s just so good at the cat and mouse game. Yeah, it was fun, obviously, whenever you can race a guy heads up like that for a million dollars, and this came up short.”
Briscoe also made no effort to hide his thoughts about Dover serving as host for the All-Star Race. To him, the event felt less like an exhibition and more like the Coca-Cola 600 arriving one week ahead of schedule. Yet amid the wrecks, cautions, and survival tactics, Dover still managed to remind him why it remains one of his favorite stops on the calendar.
He openly admitted, “I wish this was a track where we had a point race because it is a really good track. I felt the resin was unbelievable, we were able to move around all over the place.”
Crew chief Chris Gayle dissects Hamlin’s Dover win
Crew chief Chris Gayle pointed to two factors that carried the No. 11 team to victory lane. And those were speed and survival. Dover turned into a demolition derby almost from the drop of the green flag, but Hamlin avoided the chain-reaction wrecks that swallowed much of the field beginning on Lap 2.
Gayle said, “Fast car, right? That’s what really made it. You know, then you had to avoid trouble, right? We saw all those cars in the first stage. Thankfully, we were starting up front. The qualifying lap helped. We avoided all that trouble when everybody else had trouble early in segment one.”
By the time the inversion shuffled the field and forced Hamlin to cut through traffic, many of the contenders had already either limped to the garage or fallen behind the wall.
“And then the field was thinned out by the time we got inverted and had to go through the field. You didn’t have to go through as many cars, not as quality of cars. So I think, honestly, I think that’s what kept us from being caught up in something that would have prevented us from being able to take a dominant car and win with it,” he continued.
The win was Hamlin’s third straight one at Dover and his fourth overall at the track. Little by little, the Monster Mile has turned into Hamlin territory.
Now the Cup Series shifts its focus to Charlotte Motor Speedway and the Coca-Cola 600, a race Hamlin won in 2022.
