AdminJames Small and Chase Briscoe are ready to be whatever the other needs.
The duo is gearing up for their first season together in the No. 19 Toyota with Joe Gibbs Racing. Things are moving slowly at the moment, given the approaching holidays and employees working in their spare time, but the bricks have been laid in the foundation in other ways. Briscoe visited the race shop to start the process of getting key access and a laptop, and he and Small are busy making phone calls.
As things pick up later in the winter and then into the racing season, it will be a change of pace for both. For Small, it starts with having his driver present.
“It will be really great to actually have someone, like, who lives in North Carolina and two, coming into the shop multiple times a week,” Small told SiriusXM NASCAR Radio earlier this week. “We can build the team around him and involve him every week in developing the lineup so we can improve as well.
“We are all very excited to have him on board, and I think it will be a big win for the 19th team.”
Small served as Martin Truex Jr.’s leader for the past five seasons. Truex retired from full-time competition and does not live primarily in North Carolina; he was remote during the weekly team debriefs.
Briscoe, meanwhile, acknowledges that he is someone who enjoys being in the race shop. For the past seven years at Stewart-Haas Racing, Briscoe went to the shop at least once or twice a week. It might be harder to do that now with three young kids, and he’s not sure what his Gibbs schedule will look like, but he won’t be a stranger.
“I’m involved,” Briscoe said. “But it’s a little easier because I live in North Carolina, where I think Martin is in Florida or New Jersey, so it makes it a little easier from that standpoint to just get used to the team guys. James told me that I don’t think they have done a sim in three years, just because Martin has never been there. From that point of view, I know he’s excited to be able to do sim because he feels like it will make them better.
“But I’m definitely the one trying to build that relationship with the guys on my team. I have even told my wife that I will be in the store a lot in December and January to get communication with them and the relationship going, because I think it goes so far.
Just visiting the race shop was an intense transition for Briscoe. It’s different than he’s used to and more confusing to navigate. One day, Small had to help him get to the marketing department because the different hallways and stairs confused him.
Briscoe next goes to the store in the first week of December, and then he has four consecutive days of sim work.
In the meantime, the relationship building between Briscoe and Small continues in other ways.
“It was really good,” Briscoe said. “The hardest thing for me is just understanding him. It’s so hard for me to understand him; I can’t imagine in a race situation what it will be like. But it was really good. We didn’t spend much time together, but we talked a lot on the phone. Even in the last two or three weeks of the season he always made it a point to just call on Monday and talk through my weekend and see what I was fighting and what issues I was having and see if it matched up with what they had.
“I feel like we get along really well. Obviously, we haven’t been in a competitive perspective yet. We just left the circuit. But so far everything is going very well.”
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