Back-to-back wins vault Chase Briscoe back into title contention, but is it too little, too late?

CONCORD, N.C. (AP) — Chase Briscoe's hero in auto racing has always been Tony Stewart.

Now, the driver of the No. 19 Toyota is hoping to replicate what “Smoke" accomplished in 2011 when he stunned the racing world by rallying to win the NASCAR Cup Series championship by winning five of 10 playoff races, including the season finale at Homestead to register one of the sport's biggest comebacks.

“He made a pretty unbelievable run, and hopefully we can do the same thing,” Briscoe said of Stewart.

Briscoe is certainly giving it his best effort after winning back-to-back playoff races.

That included Sunday when he edged out Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Christopher Bell by .029 seconds to win the second closest race in Charlotte Motor Speedway's 66-year history.

He also won the previous week at Las Vegas.

The wins have vaulted Chase back into the “Chase.”

Two weeks ago Briscoe was 123 points behind playoff points leader Kyle Larson. He's since trimmed that deficit to 65 with four races remaining before a champion is crowned.

Denny Hamlin, at 49 points back, and Bell, 51 back, also remain ahead of Briscoe heading into the stretch run.

Now it's just a matter of whether it's too little, too late for Briscoe.

“I think we are certainly in contention," Briscoe said. "We probably need to win another race or two, but we at least put ourselves in the ballgame. That’s all you can ask for.”

Briscoe lamented four laps in the playoffs which he said have cost him 75 points due to miscues.

But he added the focus is on next week when the circuit heads to Phoenix.

“We never know how it’s going to look in four weeks from now but just have to go to the racetrack and keep winning races ultimately, and if we can do that, the points are going to be what they’re going to be at the end," he said.

Briscoe's crew chief James Small is hoping to seize on the momentum from the two wins.

“I think we’ve got to step on their throats while we can,” Small said. “I’m not going to let off the throttle pedal right now.”

When asked if the mild-mannered Briscoe was the type to step on someone’s throat, Small laughed and said, “Definitely not.”

But then Small added, “When he puts his helmet on and he’s silent, but he’s like a silent assassin.”

Briscoe got a chuckle when informed of Small's comments after the race.

“You can be a nice guy outside of the race car, but in the race car I think you have to be a killer,” Briscoe said. “For us, that’s the whole approach.”

Briscoe is expected to continue his “ultra aggressive” approach next week.

“The only way you’re going to cut into the gap is by winning races,” Briscoe said. “If you just run second or third and Larson runs second or third with you, like you’re not going to gain 65 points in four weeks. Yeah, just have to go win races and just have to be ultra aggressive truthfully and try to do everything we can in our power, and if it’s enough, it’ll be enough at the end.”

Larson's crew chief Cliff Daniels told reporters that Sunday was a good reality check for his team that the season isn't over.

Larson finished sixth on Sunday, marking the first time he has finished outside of the top five in the postseason. Still, he was able to add nine points to his lead over the second place Hamlin.

But Briscoe is the driver that clearly has his attention.

“I won’t feel comfortable until it’s over," Larson said. "Obviously, Briscoe winning and having a good day; you can take big chunks out of (the lead) if you win. We’re going to go to some tracks where others are really good coming up, so we just have to keep putting together days like (Sunday). We weren’t the fastest, but we got good points.”

See AP’s full auto racing coverage here

Chase Briscoe celebrates in Victory Lane after winning a NASCAR Cup Series auto race, Sunday, Oct. 11, 2026, in Concord, N.C. (AP Photo/Matt Kelley)

Chase Briscoe does a burnout after winning a NASCAR Cup Series auto race, Sunday, Oct. 11, 2026, in Concord, N.C. (AP Photo/Matt Kelley)

Chase Briscoe celebrates in Victory Lane after winning a NASCAR Cup Series auto race, Sunday, Oct. 11, 2026, in Concord, N.C. (AP Photo/Matt Kelley)

Chase Briscoe celebrates in Victory Lane after winning a NASCAR Cup Series auto race, Sunday, Oct. 11, 2026, in Concord, N.C. (AP Photo/Matt Kelley)

STOCKHOLM (AP) — American economists Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford won the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics Monday for their work on models that have helped governments and central banks manage economic shocks, such as energy crises and inflation.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the winners in Stockholm, noting that their work created the theoretical foundation to better understand how consumers decide whether to save or spend, insights that make it easier for policymakers worldwide to stabilize economies after fluctuations.

“The laureates’ research has made it possible to manage major macroeconomic crises far more effectively than before,” the Nobel committee wrote in a paper explaining the economists' work. “It has been hugely beneficial during the pandemic and the energy crises of recent years.”

Hall, 83, is affiliated with Stanford University in California. Woodford, who was born in 1955, is affiliated with Columbia University in New York.

Woodford spoke to the committee by phone from New York: “It’s a tremendous honor. It’s a surprise.”

For decades, governments responded to economic shocks by following the Depression-era prescriptions of the British economist John Maynard Keynes: Intervene in the economy by lowering interest rates and taxes and hiking government spending, thereby encouraging consumers and businesses to spend and invest and help restart growth.

“This is the Keynesian recipe and it worked well — until it didn’t,” said Timo Boppart of the Nobel economics committee.

Policymakers had thought economic management involved simple trade-offs — unemployment, for instance, would stay low at a time of high inflation and rise when inflation fell. But the “ stagflation ’’ of the 1970s — when the world economy experienced simultaneous high inflation and high unemployment — proved the formula was simplistic.

Some economists argued that government attempts to intervene in the economy were doomed to fail. But Hall and Woodford, in separate contributions, set about improving the Keynesian model to take into account how consumers and businesses actually make decisions about whether to invest and spend.

“Economic outcomes are the result of millions of decisions made at the microlevel by households and businesses,’’ the Nobel committee wrote. “Using models based upon this approach, rather than simply studying the economy from a macro perspective, like a bird’s eye view," Hall and Woodford’s research “generated a paradigm shift in the theory of stabilization policy.”

Hall studied the way that consumers' decisions about whether and how much to spend depend on what they expect their future income to be.

“If they are optimistic, they will consume more than if they are pessimistic,’’ the committee wrote. But consumer expectations can change unexpectedly as new information about the economy comes in. Hall found that forecasting future consumer spending is virtually impossible.

The idea that consumption is mostly unpredictable “is not good news for forecasters, or policymakers,” Olivier Blanchard, who was chief economist at the International Monetary Fund during the 2008 financial crisis, said by email. “But it is news they must take into account in thinking about the effects of policy.”

Hall also explored the idea that some households are so strapped financially that they can’t borrow or tap savings in response to economic changes. In a 1982 paper with the economist Fredric Mishkin, Hall found that around 80% of households made spending decisions based on their expectations for the future “while the rest lived hand to mouth," the committee wrote.

“The prize is for research that pushes our understanding of macroeconomics from the bottom up, from families and firms making decisions over time, while looking ahead,” Ivan Werning, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in an email.

Woodford’s research established that businesses make decisions about prices based on where they think interest rates will go in the future.

“If the business believes that its competitors’ prices and its own costs will increase, it is best to set a higher price than it would with the opposite expectation,” the Nobel committee wrote. “Businesses’ decisions are thus also governed by their expectations."

Therefore, central banks such as the U.S. Federal Reserve, which set short-term interest rates, should provide “clear and credible communication about how they reason and what they plan to do." Central banks have responded to this insight by working harder to explain what they are doing.

The new Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, has said the trend toward such “forward guidance” went too far. He's trying to scale back how much the U.S. central bank talks about its thinking and its intentions.

Woodford's research also offered guidance on how central banks should respond to energy price shocks — like the one that followed the U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran in February — that can both feed inflation and send unemployment higher.

“Unlike the traditional Keynesian models, Woodford’s model recommends a cooling measure, such as increased interest rates, to avoid uncontrolled inflation,” the Nobel committee wrote. “His insight has made it possible to respond to recent supply shocks more effectively than during the oil crises of the 1970s.”

During the phone call broadcast at a news conference, Woodford said his work has stressed “the understanding of the people who are in the markets and making decisions about spending.”

The winners did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press.

The economics prize is formally known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The central bank established it in 1968 as a memorial to Nobel, the 19th-century Swedish businessman and chemist who invented dynamite and established the five Nobel Prizes.

Nobel purists stress that the economics prize is technically not a Nobel Prize, but it is always presented together with the others on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death in 1896.

Nobel honors were announced last week in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace.

Monday’s award was the second Nobel win for a Stanford University professor this year. Dr. Karl Deisseroth shared the medicine prize with Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for their work that led to a tool that uses light to help unravel how the brain works.

The prize money this year is 12 million Swedish kronor (about $1.2 million), whether for an individual, small group of laureates or organization.

Dazio reported from Berlin, and Wiseman reported from Washington. Associated Press Writer Wyatte Grantham-Philips in Chicago contributed to this report.

AP Nobel Prizes: https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes

Portraits of Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford are shown on the screen as they are announced as the laureates of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden, Monday, Oct. 12, 2026. (Anders Wiklund/TT News Agency via AP)

Portraits of Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford are shown on the screen as they are announced as the laureates of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden, Monday, Oct. 12, 2026. (Anders Wiklund/TT News Agency via AP)

Portraits of Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford are shown on the screen as they are announced as the laureates of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden, Monday, Oct. 12, 2026. (Anders Wiklund/TT News Agency via AP)

FILE - A bust of Alfred Nobel on display following a press conference to announce the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, on Oct. 3, 2022. (Henrik Montgomery/TT News Agency via AP, File)

FILE - A Nobel medal is held up during a ceremony in New York, Dec. 8, 2020. (Angela Weiss/Pool Photo via AP, File)