Ryan Briscoe finds himself in the midst of a rebounding season — in more ways than one — heading into this weekend’s Honda Indy Toronto.
It was just a year ago that Briscoe lost his ride at Penske after five successful years with the team, spending 2013 shuffling from a one-off entry at the Indy 500 with Chip Ganassi Racing, a part-time ride with Panther Racing as well as a full slate of sports car races in the American Le Mans Series. To make matters worse, a broken wrist sustained during the Toronto doubleheader also threw his season off-course.
The 32-year-old from Sydney, Australia, returned to IndyCar full-time, and fully healed, with NTT Data Chip Ganassi Racing and reunited with his former Penske engineer Eric Cowden. Briscoe is back in the chase for the championship sitting ninth in the standings but he was caught off-guard by the amount of catching up he needed to do to finally hit his stride.
“It’s been a bit of a learning curve, honestly, which has kind of surprised me at this point in my career,” Briscoe said. “With my engineer who I have experience with, how much we had to learn and understand about these cars and get a handle on making changes that work for me, we’ve been making really good progress.”
PROGRAMMING ALERT: Watch complete coverage of the Honda Indy Toronto 2 in T.O. doubleheader starting with Race 1 Saturday on Sportsnet at 2:30 p.m. ET / 11:30 a.m. PT.
Briscoe’s return to form shined during Race 1 of the Detroit doubleheader in May when led late in the race but needed to make one more pit stop for fuel in order to make it to the checkered flag. Briscoe took a chance and stayed on the course with just over a dozen laps to go in the 70-lap race but as he was pulling away from the pack, a yellow caution flag came out to bunch up the field and dash his hopes of a promising finish.
Due to the new rules this year, Briscoe wasn’t able to enter the pits until the race returned to green and he rejoined the field in a disappointing 15th place.
“We had great pace all weekend and we were really unlucky not to get a [podium] finish in Detroit when the full-course yellow came out,” Briscoe said. “I think we’ve shown signs of being really competitive and hopefully we can prove that with some results in Toronto.
“With the pit-close rules we have this year when the yellow comes out, there’s always that roll of the dice where you get caught out if you haven’t made your stop. That’s what happened to me in Detroit and you just never know. There’s always that gamble that you have to be thinking ahead, having a heads up around you and just thinking about the finish line.”
Briscoe’s hard work has paid off since then as he’s finished within the top-10 in five of the past six races highlighted with a fourth-place finish at Pocono.
Now comes a tricky track featuring bumpy roads, surface changes, narrow straights and unforgiving concrete barriers. Toronto has had more than its fair share of accidents over the years and Briscoe knows all too well what can happen at the street course. During Race 1 a year ago, Briscoe sustained a broken right wrist after he collided with Justin Wilson and Charlie Kimball.
A lot has changed for Briscoe since then and returning to Toronto as a full-time driver in the chase for the championship has him eyeing his first win of the season at the track.
“Coming back as a full-time guy and having that confidence and approach to come in and feel like I’ve got an opportunity to win the race, that all changes everything,” Briscoe said. “(Before) it was like every other race I’d be coming in and you just wouldn’t have that continuity with the engineer, with mechanics and even just for me with the race car. You sort of just come in cold turkey and see what you’ve got and it was really difficult.
“Now, it’s just a completely different mindset. You’re chasing a championship, you’ve got that consistency building off what you’ve done in the previous race and it just makes a world of difference.”
