Briscoe, Small surprised themselves by making fuel mileage work

Chase Briscoe and James Small ended up in the one place they didn’t expect to be Sunday afternoon – victory lane.

The anxiety began after Briscoe made his final stop of the day at Pocono Raceway. Briscoe pitted under green on lap 120 of 160, but he left his pit stall too early and the team did not get all the fuel in his Toyota. Typically, in a situation where the team is waiting on fuel, Briscoe goes when the jack drops, but this time he was going to wait for his crew chief Small to release him.

In this case, Briscoe began revving the engine in anticipation of not stalling out of the box. But in doing so, it became too loud to hear the radio communication. So, when Small came over the radio saying, “Wait,” Briscoe took off based on hearing Small’s voice.

“We are (expletive) on fuel, Chase,” said Small.

The radio communication was during the lap 125 caution, the final one of the race. This set up a 30-lap run to the finish, with Briscoe cycled back to the race lead.

Briscoe went to work and was coached by his team throughout the run on fuel-saving measures to manage his fuel tank. Teammate Denny Hamlin – fortunately for Briscoe at a dirty air disadvantage – still tried to do what he could to apply pressure to Briscoe to force him to run out of fuel.

Not only did he make the finish, but Briscoe had enough fuel to return to the frontstretch after the cool-down lap and do a burnout. It was his first win with Gibbs and the third of his career.

“I think some of that is probably why I've not savored the moment as much, because I truthfully did not think I was going to win,” Briscoe said. “I'm still in shock, truthfully. It still hasn't hit me just because I fully expected to run out of fuel.

"I didn't know our fuel situation. I knew we were probably going to be short. I couldn't have saved any more fuel, but I still figured when the two (laps) to go came, I've watched races here long enough to see where the leader runs out of fuel. I'm like, 'I’m going to be the next guy that runs out.' I was waiting for it.

“We took the white flag and I was waiting for it to stumble off of (Turn) 1, and was waiting for it to stumble off of (Turn) 2. In (Turn) 3, I kind of lifted early to try to save fuel. But I was like, 'Man, what if I don't run hard here, and if I do run out and they beat me to the line?' It was just a weird mix of emotions because I've never really been in that situation before. I definitely am surprised, honestly, that we made it on fuel. I guess maybe we learned something because we've talked about that all year long, we're probably taking too much fuel in a lot of these races. For us to be able to stretch it like we did, hopefully, we can learn something from that.”

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Fortunately, Briscoe knew right away he was likely in bad shape before Small even came on the radio. He immediately started saving fuel before the final caution came out.

“He’s very open to listening and trying to put in place what we're trying to tell him,” Small said. “That's one great thing about him. He did an excellent job just managing that. I was shocked that we made it, to be honest. We even had enough fuel to do a couple of burnouts, and rolled into victory lane there, and it ran out. So, credit to everybody – all the engineers, everybody at TRD, and everybody behind that.”