[h=2]IMSA: Briscoe's wild tale of birth and victory[/h] Wednesday, 06 July 2016


Marshall Pruett / Images by LAT & courtesy of Ryan Briscoe








Few racecar drivers have experienced the wild emotional swings Ryan Briscoe endured late last week. With an event at Watkins Glen with the Ford Chip Ganassi Racing team, his wife Nicole on the clock to give birth to their second child, and the absolute need to focus on both duties at the same time, Briscoe's stretch from Thursday through Sunday must have felt like his own private endurance race.
Start with all of the baby-related driving back and forth between his home in Connecticut and the Watkins Glen track located in Upstate New York. Then add his day job competing in the Sahlen's Six Hours of The Glen on Sunday, and finish it off with an amazing outcome where he welcomed daughter Blake James Briscoe to the world (below) and won the GT Le Mans class with teammate Richard Westbrook in a three-day span.
With a day or two to gather his thoughts at the amazing adventure, a sleep-deprived and slightly delirious Australian recounted the experience for RACER.
"It was pretty crazy," Briscoe said. "I thought I would try to be in two places at once over the weekend. A little bit of racing, a little bit of baby making, and it all worked out pretty well for me.
"I live in Connecticut. It is about a five-hour drive from Watkins Glen where I had the race this weekend. Nicole, she's 37 weeks pregnant. We weren't expecting the baby until another two-plus weeks from last week. But she went to the doctor last Wednesday and the doctors [saw] she had high blood pressure. They were a little bit worried. She was reading ahead in the pregnancy size wise, [a] week ahead, she had a bit of swelling. It looked like she was carrying a lot of fluids. The doctors were like, all right, let's keep an eye on this, we want you to come back Friday morning if your blood pressure is still high, most likely were going to want to pull the baby out for your own safety.
"Thursday I drive to Watkins Glen as planned. Obviously, with the cell phone on hand at all times. We did all our prep work and meetings and track walk and so forth. I was talking to Nicole Thursday night. She had had some additional information from the doctors from some bloodwork she had done and it sounded like there was now just maybe a five percent chance that she would have the baby the next day. I was pretty relaxed and said, 'OK, it's good. It will probably be next week or something.' But she went to the doctor at 8:30 on Friday morning, we had first practice at like 11 a.m. or something, [and] I was hanging back at the hotel till I heard from Nicole.
"Alas, 8:35 she gives me the call, she's all in tears and she's like, 'We are having a baby today! I had already talked to the team on Thursday and told them about the possible scenario that we would be having the baby the next day. They told me they were perfectly cool with me skipping practice. We'd play it by ear from there as to how things were going. In the car I jumped. Five hours back to Hartford Hospital. And out came the baby at 5:30 that afternoon."

 

Briscoe spent five hours in the car driving to Watkins Glen on Thursday and turned around for five more hours to get to the hospital on Friday. With Westbrook handling the driving duties in their No. 67 Ford GT, Briscoe was finally able to concentrate on family matters, and upon his return, things only got better.
"Richard was doing a fantastic job up at the Glen in practice, he was P2 in first practice, led the second practice," Briscoe continued. "I'm quite familiar with the track at the Glen, they were OK with me showing up Thursday afternoon and missing all the practice and qualifying and just getting all the laps in for warm-up. I jumped in the car [to leave the hospital] late Saturday morning and got there in time to watch Westbrook stick the Ford on pole. And then I was there for Sunday. And we won the race. It was a bit of a fairy-tale story."
As a father with a young family, Westbrook knew exactly what his teammate was facing all weekend and, as Briscoe found, the Ganassi team also made sure the environment was just right for him once he was able to settle in late Saturday.
"Richard was very supportive and absolutely happy to do all the heavy lifting for us," Briscoe said. "My engineer, Brad [Goldberg], he has two very young boys actually and he completely understood. He had to come to Sebring this year a couple days late with the birth of his second child. So he was like, 'No, absolutely, we've got this; just make sure you are here on Sunday. We'll go and do our best.' I had full support from the team. I got to the track and I had gifts there and a card signed by everyone on the team. Just really nice to have that support from everybody. It was really cool."
Briscoe's high-mileage adventure, which included two complete round trips and a six-hour sportscar race, added up to almost 24 hours of driving in four days. That time, however, paled in comparison to what Nicole was dealing with at the hospital.
"It was four trips," he said of spending 20 hours on the highway. "Man, I got back to the hospital Sunday night at about 11 p.m. I mean, I was exhausted. The routine of a newborn, it is [feeding] every two hours. And the hard thing, our little baby girl, Blake, she came a little bit early. She had some amniotic fluid in the lungs so she had to go to the neonatal intensive care unit for a couple of days. So Sunday night she was still down there.
"For the feedings and everything, it is not just get out of bed and she's by the bedside. You have to walk down the hallway, go down the elevator to a whole new area of the hospital. I mean, it was painful. I was so exhausted. Nicole is an absolute trooper. She is so strong. I had to be there for her."
Bringing a trophy home from Watkins Glen only made Briscoe's absence easier to handle.
"She was obviously super pleased that we got the win, and she understands how the racing works and how important it is," he said of his wife, who serves as one of ESPN's anchors. "I think we were both extremely happy that I was able to be there for the birth. By the time I left on Saturday her mom and dad were down, our nanny was in town who helped looked after (their daughter) Finley. One of her best friends from Maine came down, and so she was by the bedside. Nicole had plenty of support, which really gave me a lot of comfort in being able to head back to the racetrack and get back to my day job."
Patterning himself after his wife, Ryan turned into the family's reporter and kept his followers engaged through social media during the hectic days surrounding Blake's arrival. Briscoe, who is guaranteed to be short on sleep for this weekend's IMSA race at Canadian Tire Motorsports Park, gets to leave the reporting – and the mad dashes to the hospital – behind.
"It was just another page to our story," he said. "It was a pretty fun one to document."
Practice for the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship event at CTMP begins on Friday.