Fresh off his first NASCAR Cup Series top ten, Chase Briscoe is heading back to the Xfinity Series for a one-off, and will be joined by a new car as his team-mate. B.J. McLeod Motorsports has announced he will drive the #99 Ford Mustang in Saturday’s Alsco Uniforms 300 at Charlotte Motor Speedway, while the team will introduce a new #76 car for Stefan Parsons.
“Super excited to get back in the @XfinityRacing series this weekend at Charlotte, can’t wait to get behind the wheel of the always good looking Production Alliance Group car,” Briscoe tweeted. “Looking for redemption after a win in this scheme got away at Fontana last year!”
Before moving up to the Cup Series in 2021, Briscoe dominated the Xfinity Series the previous year. After scoring two combined wins across his first two seasons in NASCAR’s second tier, he broke out with a series-high nine victories in 2020. He finished fourth in the Championship Round, but would have been the runner-up in a hypothetical season-long points battle.
Briscoe was elevated to the top series the following year. After a quiet start to the year, he finally scored his first career top-ten finish at Circuit of the Americas on Sunday with a sixth-place run. After fourteen races, he is currently twenty-fifth in the standings and leading the Rookie of the Year battle. In March, he made another return to the lower series when he ran the Camping World Truck Series race at Bristol Dirt and Kansas, where he respectively finished fifth and nineteenth for Roper Racing.
The Indiana native won the fall Xfinity race at Charlotte in 2018, the track’s first NASCAR event on the Roval configuration. On the oval, however, he has yet to notch a top ten in three attempts and came close in 2019 when he finished eleventh. His lone Truck run at Charlotte in 2017 also ended in eleventh.
Parsons has raced on a part-time basis for BJMM since 2019 with a best finish of twelfth in his series début at Daytona. Much of his starts for the team have come in the #99, including all five of his 2021 runs to date. His highest placement on the year is thirteenth in the Daytona opener.
The addition of the #76 will mark BJMM’s first time racing with four cars in a single event as it and the #99 are joined by the #78 of Jesse Little and #5 of Matt Mills. #76 last raced in the Xfinity Series with Spencer Boyd in 2018 for SS-Green Light Racing.
Parsons will have to qualify his way into Saturday’s race with forty-three entries hoping to make the grid of thirty-six. Entering the week, the three pre-existing teams switched owner points with the #5’s going to the #78, the #78’s to the #99, and the #99’s to the #5; such a decision comes on the heels of the #78 failing to qualify at COTA. The #5 also had Briscoe’s Stewart-Haas Racing team-mate Kevin Harvick in the car for COTA, where he finished fourth for BJMM’s best run.
The #99 has also been piloted by Andy Lally, Mason Massey, Ryan Ellis, Vinnie Miller, and team owner B.J. McLeod in 2021, with Ellis finishing twenty-fourth in its most recent start at COTA. Officially the #199 in NASCAR’s record book following the points swap, it is thirty-eighth in the owner standings.