KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Denny Hamlin admits he went a little too far with the way he raced Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Ty Gibbs last Sunday at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
How all the Joe Gibbs Racing drivers race each other going forward was the subject of a driver meeting Wednesday with JGR leadership, which included team co-owners Joe Gibbs and his daughter-in-law Heather Gibbs.
“Absolutely. I definitely got hot under the collar, and it went too far on my end,” Hamlin said Saturday prior to practice at Kansas Speedway. “There were things I wish I could have done a little bit differently.”
Ty Gibbs is towed after an on-track incident with Denny Hamlin during the NASCAR Cup Series Mobil 1 301 at New Hampshire
Hamlin felt Gibbs was racing him and Christopher Bell too hard for 11th less than halfway into the race at New Hampshire, as Hamlin and Bell appeared to be faster. Hamlin nudged Gibbs, whose car crashed into the wall and the damage eventually ended the race for Gibbs.
After the race, Hamlin said that “understanding down and distance seems to be the struggle” for Gibbs. He also indicated on his in-car radio that no one at JGR wanted to tell Gibbs — the only JGR driver who is not in the playoffs — how to race, considering Gibbs is the grandson of the team owner.
“I think [we] are in a good place,” Hamlin said. “The [conversations] were all productive. The guts of that are going to be confidential.”
None of the drivers would give details about the meeting. The playoff drivers had required media availability on Saturday so they couldn’t avoid questions. Ty Gibbs, when approached by reporters after qualifying as a golf kart met him beside pit road, started to answer a question but was driven away.
Ty Gibbs ended up not answering questions about the JGR drivers’ meeting.
Gibbs had sponsor obligations on Monday and Tuesday. The JGR competition meetings are Mondays, so the meeting with the drivers and ownership was on Wednesday. After the race Sunday, Hamlin had urged Joe Gibbs to get involved. Gibbs, in a separate interview, said he expected the drivers to handle it.
“All the drivers had an opportunity to speak and try to come up with a plan,” Hamlin said. “We did our best to come up with one.”
JGR driver Chase Briscoe said the team owner showed why he won Super Bowls and is a Pro Football Hall of Fame coach (as well as a NASCAR Hall of Fame team owner).
“I was just mind-blown of just how good he is in just being a coach and just a leader,” Briscoe said. “It makes sense why he’s been successful on the racing side of things, but even the coaching side.
“He’s just so good at just explaining stuff and putting things into perspective.”
Briscoe said the message was pretty clear for the drivers of an organization that is in its 34th season of Cup racing.
“Just us being smarter,” Briscoe said. “You look at Penske, they are probably the best example of just how to help each other out, and they know that the more they can help each other, the better it’s going to be for all of them.
“It’s something that, truthfully, we probably haven’t done the greatest job at. And that was the conversation essentially. We can make it way easier on ourselves. It’s already hard to win a championship as it is. Coach has been in this for … years. He’s only won five. And we’re not doing ourselves any favors, as hard as it is, just on each other.”
It is obvious to the Gibbs drivers that they can’t race like that. It is pretty much common teammate code not to wreck the teammate with the expectation that if both drivers are racing for the win or for position to advance in the playoffs, that the give-and-take attitude changes.
“It was productive, and hopefully we do better moving forward,” Bell said. “It’s definitely fair to say that a line was crossed, and that was bad.
“We don’t need to get any teammates wrecked. Hopefully, we do better moving forward. … We all want to see each other do well and succeed. The only thing that I will sum this up is that we had a productive meeting, and I feel optimistic about changes moving forward.”
Hamlin had noted in his podcast earlier in the week that Ross Chastain, a driver he has had issues with, actually let him go by when he appeared faster. Chastain said Saturday he once raced with the mantra “every lap, every race, every time” and even has a homemade plaque some relatives made for him with that saying.
But in that situation, Chastain said if he tried to keep Hamlin behind him, those behind Hamlin would have caught both of them.
“I thought about that [saying] this week when they had their issues,” Chastain said. “I definitely have evolved from that because letting Denny by was the [right] thing to do at that point, and that will come back around.
“I can tell you my teammates don’t have that hard of a time with me.”
It sounds like that is the way it should be for Gibbs.
“Things will be different going forward for us,” Briscoe said. “It’s unfortunate that stuff has to happen, but typically when you have to have tough conversations, things are normally for the better going forward. So I’m sure it will be different.”
Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR and INDYCAR for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including over 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass.
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