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.
