How Gabehart is reshaping Joe Gibbs Racing

Chris Gabehart admittedly had one big fear when he became the competition director at Joe Gibbs Racing: not having an impact.

Gabehart was named to the role in November after six seasons as the leader of the No. 11 team for Denny Hamlin. It was, as he laughs when he looks back now, the longest single job he’s ever had in anything. Plus, the new role meant going from a single-minded focus on his race team to all four Gibbs entries.

But it turns out, his fear was for nothing.

“It’s fun and exciting to zoom out and do something different,” Gabehart told RACER. “I certainly feel like I have (made a unique impact), and that’s been gratifying. It’s so new. There are so many things that I’m having to keep track of.”

While he’s explaining as such in the garage at Talladega Superspeedway, it provides a real-world example.

“I’m looking at a group over your shoulder,” Gabehart said. “I’m not going to mention any specifics, but I just had a conversation with them for 10 minutes. Last year, there (would be) no chance I would be thinking about how to take that and turn it into speed. Now it’s my job. It’s just wild how different it is, certainly. There’s a lot to do.”

Gabehart and Gibbs get a passing grade through the first quarter of the Cup Series season. For those looking in from the outside, some metrics can easily help make such a case. One such barometer is the race wins, and Gibbs leads the series with five wins in 11 races. Furthermore, all four drivers have led laps.

Hamlin has won two of those races with Chris Gayle, who inherited Gabehart’s seat on the No. 11 pit box. Ty Gibbs, meanwhile, is also working with a new crew chief, Tyler Allen. Gayle was previously working with Gibbs.

Joe Gibbs, who has fielded cars in the Cup Series since the early 1990s and knows about needing the right people in the right places, mentioned the depth of talent within the organization when the personnel changes were made. The changes coincided with Chase Briscoe joining the fold for the retired Martin Truex Jr., and as Christopher Bell and his crew chief, Adam Stevens, just missed advancing to their third consecutive championship race.

Bell and Stevens came out of the gate with three wins in the first four weeks. It was Stevens, two weekends into the year, who confidently stated the series would see a more competitive Joe Gibbs Racing about six to eight races into the season because of its offseason decisions.

“I’m really proud of where we’re at right now, but it’s not because our performance is where I want it to be,” Gabehart said. “It’s because of how we’re getting results when our performance is not where I want it to be. So, that means you’re executing at a high level. There are plenty of ways that I’m tracking this year that are unique to my time at our company, at least, that I wanted to look at things a little bit differently and challenge the groups in a little bit of a different way that are showing benefits.

“If we can get the performance where we want it to be – which is a never-ending quest; you’re never fast enough, let’s just be clear, and it’s not like we’re performing badly. But there are some key metrics that we look at that show that we have performed better. Even during the last half of last year, we performed at a high level but didn’t get the results. But right now, we’re clearly executing at a pretty high level and I’m proud of that.”

The second half of the 2024 season for Gibbs has been well-documented. The organization went the last 18 races without winning, but qualified all four drivers for the postseason. The six victories Gibbs tallied (between Bell and Hamlin) were all earned by mid-June. And then there was a lot of ‘could have’ and ‘should have’ talk to end the season.

Gabehart could have sat and gone through numerous races, and if “the wind blew a different direction,” the company could have had 12 wins. The nature of racing through such a long season is the ebbs and flows that come with it, and Gabehart understands that everyone needs to stay level-headed. The key is recognizing how the teams performed through those ripples, because that brings results in the long run.

And speaking the long run, in this next chapter in Gabehart’s career, he will continue to find ways to best be a conduit between the race shop resources and the race teams. Who knows, maybe this will end up being the longest job he’s ever had.

“It’s a job that has a lot of information passing through it, both from the shop and from the race team side,” Gabehart said. “Then, on the business side, learning that and how to make a difference, and literally having to look six and 12 months, maybe even 18 months, down the road or longer in some instances, is a big part of what I do. It’s been a lot.

“There is really a lot more to it than when the green flag drops and when the checkered flag falls.”