Sept. 15, 2015
By Reid Spencer
NASCAR Wire Service
Could team owner Joe Gibbs’ fondest dream become Joe Gibbs Racing’s worst nightmare?
Would
it really benefit the organization if all four JGR drivers — Kyle
Busch, Denny Hamlin, Matt Kenseth and Carl Edwards — happened to qualify
for the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup finale at Homestead-Miami
Speedway?
Is there any way it could actually happen?
“Obviously
you'd love that,” Gibbs said Saturday night at Richmond International
Raceway, after Kenseth gave JGR its seventh victory in nine NASCAR
Sprint Cup Series races and the organization’s 11th in the 26-race
regular season. “But that's a dream. It's hard for a dream to come
true.
“I
don't think anybody here is realistically thinking about that as a
possibility. I think there's so many good cars in there. We were just
talking about the 4 car (reigning champion Kevin Harvick), the 22 (2014
finalist Joey Logano), the 2 (2012 champion Brad Keselowski). All those
cars are capable of winning a championship — period.”
Busch,
who qualified for the Chase despite missing the first 11 Cup races of
the season because of injury, is delighted JGR is the only organization
to put four cars in the Chase, but he acknowledges a four-car Gibbs
finale at Homestead would complicate matters.
“I
know Joe Gibbs would look at it and say that he can be considered
another NASCAR champion if all four cars make it to Homestead with a
chance for the championship,” Busch told the NASCAR Wire Service at
Richmond. “But I’ll tell you what — all four of these teams would
absolutely hate that.
“I
just think it would be so awkward that we wouldn’t know how to work
together. We wouldn’t know if we were supposed to work together or if we
weren’t supposed to work together… But I’ll tell you what. Joe Gibbs
wouldn’t care. He’d be happy as a clam.”
Busch’s
return from a broken right leg and left foot suffered in the
season-opening NASCAR XFINITY Series race at Daytona International
Speedway helped form a critical mass that galvanized the entire team.
The
driver of the No. 18 Toyota won at Sonoma in late June, starting a
string of 11 races in which JGR drivers would record eight victories, a
dominant run interrupted only by Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s restrictor-plate
victory at Daytona and Joey Logano’s triumphs at Watkins Glen and
Bristol.
“Of
course, Kyle coming back from a serious injury, to be able to do what
he's done, that was a huge deal for us this year,” Gibbs said.
Coming
off a lackluster 2014 season that produced but two victories, JGR
shuffled its crew chief lineup, pairing Darian Grubb with newbie
Edwards, moving Dave Rogers to Hamlin’s No. 11 Camry, keeping Jason
Ratcliff with Kenseth and promoting XFINITY Series crew chief Adam
Stevens to the leadership of Busch’s Cup crew.
To
Busch, the personnel moves made a huge difference. And when Busch
returned, Stevens was fully engaged with a driver of prodigious talent
whose input and feedback are invaluable assets to the entire competitive
effort.
“I
think the biggest thing is all the crew chief swapping going on, and
bringing Adam Stevens in and some new fresh faces and engineers and some
different ideas that maybe we haven’t quite used in years past,” Busch
said.
“I think all of that kind of goes together, and it’s made us a tougher group to be competitive at the race track.”
That
there is even talk of an all-Gibbs championship battle at Homestead is
simply a testament to the strength the organization has shown throughout
the summer.
Is
it realistic? Probably not. Hendrick Motorsports put all four of its
drivers in the Chase last year. None made it to the season finale.
But
it’s also unrealistic to believe that same fate will befall JGR this
year. The team’s confidence, as reflected by Busch, is at an all-time
high. Entering the Chase, Busch and Kenseth are tied for the series lead
with Jimmie Johnson at four victories each.
Kenseth
has won two of the last four Cup races. He and Busch finished 1-2 at
Richmond. A week earlier, Edwards and Hamlin were first and third,
respectively, at Darlington.
“Got
to get to Homestead — that’s how we look at it,” Busch summed up his
Chase objective. “And in all realism and honesty, I don’t feel like it
should be that hard to make it to Homestead. Sometimes I feel like we
make it harder on ourselves than we actually should, or than it actually
is.
“We
just need to do our part. We just need to do what got us here, continue
to run well and make good decisions, both in the garage area and on the
race track, and finish these races out the way we know how to.”
Between
the Darlington and Richmond races, Hamlin tore the ACL in his right
knee, but he led 14 laps and finished sixth at Richmond. Though the knee
will require surgery in the off-season, Hamlin said the pain didn’t
bother him in the car and shouldn’t faze him in the Chase races.
“I
wasn’t limited in the car at all,” Hamlin said. “Just you really don’t
notice anything until you stop, and that’s the biggest thing. As soon as
I stopped, it’s just feeling the throbbing, feeling your heart beating
in your knee. Just tightened up there towards the end, but we just
didn’t have a fast enough car to win.”
The bottom line, though, is that all four Gibbs cars are capable of winning at any time, on any track.
And,
yes, Joe Gibbs would be thrilled if all four of his cars were still in
the running in the season finale, but perhaps not as elated as the
manufacturer that supports his cars — Toyota. A strong presence in the
Cup series since 2007, Toyota has yet to win a championship at NASCAR’s
highest level.
Heading
for Homestead with a title guaranteed would be a dream come true for
the manufacturer as well as for Gibbs — even if it happened to
complicate the lives of the four drivers, all of whom are chasing a goal
only one of them can achieve.
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