PHOENIX (AP) — Ty Gibbs knew his teammate had to win the last race of the regular season to qualify for the Xfinity Series Championship.
And yet Gibbs knocked Brandon Jones off the lead on the last lap last week at Martinsville Speedway as Gibbs clinched his sixth win of the season.
Had he been content with just second place, Gibbs and Jones would both have advanced to Saturday’s title race to give Joe Gibbs Racing a pair of Toyotas in the winner-take-all final of the four-driver championship at Phoenix Raceway.
Why did he do it?
“It boils down to just being caught in the moment, and you know selfish actions led to that,” Gibbs said Thursday at the Phoenix Convention Center.
20-year-old Gibbs — whose grandfather, Joe Gibbs, is a NASCAR and NFL Hall of Famer and owner of one of NASCAR’s top organizations — had a miserable week preparing for his first national championship. He made it himself by preventing Jones from winning in Martinsville, where the crowd chanted “Thanks, Grandpa” while Gibbs celebrated the win.
Then, after the race, Gibbs compared himself to Jesus in an interview when asked if he was NASCAR’s newest villain. “I keep coming back to the same verse that Jesus was hated first and among all men.”
Gibbs said Thursday he regrets the comment and said he didn’t deliver the sentence the way he intended. But he regrets pretty much everything from last Saturday and has been on an apology tour to JGR, with Jones and with Toyota who is furious that one of their cars was knocked out of the championship.
Because of Gibb’s action, the title race is reduced to one Toyota driver and three Chevrolets from the JR Motorsports trio of Noah Gragson, Josh Berry and Justin Allgaier. Riders from every series – including Gibbs’ veteran teammates at JGR – have criticized Gibbs for Martinsville and his rivals are piling up en route to the finals.
“He does not care. He lives in fantasy land,” Gragson said Thursday. “I honestly have no idea what’s going through his head. It must be brutal living in a world where you just don’t have any real consequences or anything.”
The story goes on
However, his grandfather this week insisted there would be consequences for his grandson. Ty Gibbs said Thursday he doesn’t know what they would be but will accept any punishment that comes his way.
He’s expected to be named to replace Kyle Busch in the #18 Toyota in the Cup Series – one of NASCAR’s top drives – and Gibbs doesn’t know if Martinsville has changed that.
“When difficult things happen, and certainly nobody wanted that, I said, ‘Now there are consequences,’ and so we try to go through them with him,” said Joe Gibbs. “Ty’s going through this, I’m going through this, and we’re still in that process. It was something that was heat of battle. Everything happens. It was so busy.”
To make matters worse, Jones is leaving JGR after Saturday’s race to drive for JR Motorsports next season and has no reason to help Gibbs win the championship. In fact, he was able to actively prevent him from winning the title by working with his future JRM teammates out of spite.
Additionally, Jones’ father is JR Executive Chairman at Rheem, a principal sponsor of Christopher Bell at JGR. Bell will be in contention for the Cup title on Sunday and Rheem has given no indication that it will take punitive action against the organization for Jones’ disappointing end with the team.
Ty Gibbs is a successful young driver: He won his NASCAR debut in 2021 and has 10 wins in 50 starts. He won the ARCA Championship last season and has been doing double duty as a substitute for injured driver Kurt Busch in the Cup Series since July. Gibbs will make his 16th Cup start the day after his race for the Xfinity Championship.
But Gibbs was also an aggressive driver – he even used the word “dirty” to describe some of his on-track actions on Thursday – and was scolded for several incidents before Martinsville. He got into a fight with Sam Mayer on the pit lane, in which Gibbs, while wearing his helmet, began throwing punches at Mayer. And NASCAR fined Gibbs $75,000 for a Cup Series pit lane incident in which he nearly pushed a competitor’s car onto the staff.
Coy Gibbs is the vice chairman at JGR and Ty is his son. He has defended him in the past and although he admitted the Martinsville race was “disappointing”, Coy Gibbs was still behind his son.
“Look, he’s my child. I appreciate his aggression. But sometimes you have to step back a bit. This is a point where we have to take something back,” said Coy Gibbs. “I just spoke to him and explained to him that this doesn’t just affect him, it affects our entire company, all our sponsors, all the people we deal with, Toyota, obviously Brandon.
“These are things you might not be thinking about in that split second, but hopefully we can get together with him and enlighten him on those things.”
Gibbs still has a long way to go to change the perception he’s created for himself, especially as he’s poised to step up to the tougher Cup series next season. He certainly appeared humble on Thursday but knows he needs to prove himself on track to change opinions and earn the respect of his rivals and JGR teammates.
“I have to face the fact that I made a mistake and I have to do the hardest work to fix those issues,” Gibbs said. “I put myself in that position, I didn’t have to make it that difficult for myself this week. And it really hurts me because it’s my family’s team and we’re one big family. All of her pain and anger affects me. I’ve gone through the scenario a million times. If I could do it again, I definitely would.”
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