Stewart-Haas Racing, Chase Briscoe deliver full-circle win at Darlington

In NASCAR, things have a tendency to come full circle.

That was the case on Sunday night, where Chase Briscoe — driving the same No. 14 car that his childhood hero, Tony Stewart, made iconic — won the Southern 500 at Darlington to clinch a playoff berth in the Cup Series regular-season finale.

The nature in which Briscoe won the crown jewel race seemed like something his boss would've done when Briscoe was just a kid watching on TV, as an incredible slingshot move with 25 laps to go shot Briscoe from fourth to the race lead in a matter of seconds.

After a late-race restart saw two-time Cup Series champion Kyle Busch — who like Briscoe, needed a win to make the playoffs — claw his way to second place, the two drivers put on an incredible game of cat and mouse that ended in Briscoe barely edging the 63-time Cup Series winner to claim the victory.

The win was eerily reminiscent of the 2020 Xfinity Series race at Darlington, where Briscoe outdueled Busch in what was the Xfinity Series' first race back from the COVID-19 pandemic. That win was particularly emotional for Briscoe, whose wife, Marissa, suffered a miscarriage just two days before the race took place.

As Briscoe soaked up his victory on Sunday night with his son Brooks beside him, enjoying his moment with dad, a September night in 2024 couldn't feel much farther from that May afternoon in 2020, where Briscoe was not only dealing with personal loss but also with professional pressure to perform.

2020 would go on to be Briscoe's best year to that point, however, as he won nine races and made it to the Xfinity Series championship race at Phoenix.

2021 saw Briscoe be called up to the NASCAR Cup Series to drive SHR's famed No. 14, and at Phoenix in 2022, Briscoe broke through for his first Cup Series victory in a season that ended with a Cinderella run to the Round of 8.

For Briscoe and the No. 14 team individually, 2023 and the first 25 races of 2024 saw a drop-off in performance. The on-track issues were complicated by the fact that Stewart-Haas announced in May that they were shutting down at the end of 2024, bringing an end to a team that at one point seemed destined to reach the same heights as Joe Gibbs Racing and Hendrick Motorsports.

That's not to say SHR hasn't performed during its time in the Cup Series — championships with Stewart in 2011 and Kevin Harvick in 2014 disprove that — but a sharp decline in speed since the end of 2020 made it clear that whether or not the doors stayed open, there was little light at the end of the tunnel.

In a modern sports world that is increasingly more about money and business rather than the love of the game, the former seemed to almost fade into the South Carolina sky that witnessed Briscoe's victory on Sunday night.

At the end of the day, both Briscoe and SHR have plans for the future — Briscoe will join Joe Gibbs Racing in 2025 and Gene Haas will retain one Cup Series charter — but Sunday's win seemed to strip away the unfortunate business of racing and plant a seed of hope in an organization with little to speak of.

Now, the 323 employees that make up Stewart-Haas Racing have an opportunity to go win a championship and leave the sport the same way they came into it a decade and a half ago — with a bang only Tony Stewart could dream up.