Denny Hamlin said the team had "productive meetings" about how the drivers should race each other moving forward.
KANSAS CITY, Kans. — The details of the meeting, Joe Gibbs Racing’s drivers are keeping to themselves, but the message was clear this week.
Be kind to one another on the track.
Car owner Joe Gibbs gathered his drivers a few days after Denny Hamlin’s contact wrecked Ty Gibbs at New Hampshire and expressed his ire about Ty Gibbs not relinquishing his spot to Hamlin, who is racing for a championship while his teammate is not.
“I think it’s definitely fair to say a line was crossed and that was bad,” Christopher Bell said Saturday at Kansas Speedway. “We don’t need to get any teammates wrecked. Hopefully, we do better moving forward. I think that’s the goal for us to race each other better than we were.”
Hamlin said “we had some meetings this week and they were all productive meetings. The guts of that are going to be confidential.”
Hamlin said “all the drivers had an opportunity to speak and try to come up with a plan. We did our best to come up with one.”
Hamlin noted he could have handled last weekend’s incident better.
“I definitely got hot under the collar and it went too far on my end,” Hamlin said. “There was things I wish I could have done a little bit differently.”
As for Ty Gibbs?
After qualifying Saturday, Ty Gibbs walked down pit road and got into a golf cart. As he started to answer a reporter’s question, he was whisked away.
Teammate Chase Briscoe, in his first year at Joe Gibbs Racing, experienced a different type of meeting that he has with Joe Gibbs.
“I was just mind blown at just how good he is at being a coach and a leader,” Briscoe said in response to a question from NBC Sports. “It makes a sense why he’s been successful on the race side of things but even the coaching side. He’s just so good at just explaining stuff and putting things into perspective.”
Briscoe said he felt things would change for the teammates after the meeting.
“I certainly think that things will be different going forward for us just from a teammate side of things, just trying to make it easier for all of 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. I’m sure it will be.”
Chris Gabehart, competition director for Joe Gibbs Racing, said: “Every now and then when you compete toward the front at a high level, you’ve got to go over this thing and understand that everybody is racing for something and everybody has got to be heard and then we’ve got to come to a resolution of how do we race moving forward.
“That’s exactly what happened. I’m not going to get into any of the details, and frankly actions speak louder than words. That’s true of anyone in here, not just JGR drivers. Just got to focus on Kansas and know we did our part this week and everybody said their peace and we’ll move on from there.”
Category: General Sports
