LDN - Sports

For Gibbs racing, lack of speed continues

[May 02, 2017] By Jonathan Ingram, The Sports Xchange

For a team that won 12 races last season and came within one restart of winning the championship, Joe Gibbs Racing is off to a slow start in 2017.

At the Richmond International Raceway on Sunday, JGR had a car and driver in the right place. But once again, there was a relatively slow race finish.

That's been the problem all season for a team that is having a difficult time adapting to the new Toyota Camry bodywork. Is the team done? Is the championship already out of reach after just nine races without a victory and only one driver in the top 10 in points? (Kyle Busch, ranked 10th, is 163 points behind leader Kyle Larson.)

The best answer is a quick look at one of the team's chief competitors, Hendrick Motorsports. Last year, the Hendrick team introduced a rookie driver to replace Jeff Gordon, lost Dale Earnhardt Jr. to a concussion for the second half of the season and went 24 races without a victory. But before the season was over, Jimmie Johnson had won five races and his seventh championship.

It would be foolish to consider the Gibbs team out of the picture or desperate, although at times drivers Busch and Denny Hamlin, who finished third behind the two Fords of Team Penske on Sunday, appeared to be on the ragged edge at Richmond.

Given that Gibbs' cars had won 10 of the previous 16 events at the Virginia track, including a sweep of the two races last year, the Gibbs drivers did appear overanxious to prove themselves once again.

On a hot day at a slick track where occasionally cars went into the corners four-wide, it was as if Hamlin and Busch drove like the 0.75-mile track was a good place to break their collective losing streak and sometimes risked more than other drivers to prove it.

Hamlin summed it up afterward. There was a chance to compensate for speed on a short oval from the cockpit. He said his third-place finish behind Joey Logano and Brad Keselowski underscored the need for speed.

"I think we know that we have some shortfalls, and when I'm running out front my balance is very, very good, where I need it to be, and we just don't have a car that was quite fast enough," Hamlin said. "Aerodynamics matter, skew matters, things like that, and we're just a little behind. So we've got to just take solace in some small wins and goals, and today was a good finish.

"We executed great, didn't make any mistakes and finished right where we should have. We at least can build on that and try to survive this time of the season where we don't have the fastest cars."

Before the race, Hamlin talked about the fact that a team does not stay dominant long in NASCAR, because cars are parked next to one another in the garage, allowing teams to watch each other carefully to discern secrets. But another, perhaps more important element, is the open inspection process, where teams can also watch cars go through the templates.

Perhaps most painful for the Gibbs team is watching the performance of Martin Truex Jr. at Furniture Row Racing. Driving the new Camry, Truex Jr. stands second in the points, has one victory and is tied for second in postseason bonus points with 10.

The Furniture Row team receives all of its custom-built chassis from Gibbs and the two teams share set-up information. Gibbs also knows what kind of aerodynamic numbers Furniture Row is producing, one clue on where his team is behind. But clearly the affiliation of the two Toyota teams does not include sharing all speed secrets.

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"You've still got to have raw speed," said Hamlin. "You cannot just have a better setup than those guys and go out and beat them. You have to have a faster car, and we just -- you know, I'm optimistic. I hate to be pessimistic about today, but we've got to be real about it and realize, 'Hey, it's just a short track. We still have a lot of work to do to catch up.'"

There have been some significant changes at the Gibbs team during the past two seasons. Busch's remarkable championship in 2015 and last year's near-miss by Carl Edwards took place against a backdrop of the departure of the team's president, J.D. Gibbs, who is suffering from brain function issues, and Nelson Cosgrove, the director of engineering who moved to Toyota Racing Development. In the off-season, Edwards announced he was taking time off and was replaced by rookie Daniel Suarez.

Although the team drafted capable replacements from within, one wonders if the changes in key personnel have something to do with troubles getting up to speed with the new Camry.

Hamlin remains confident about finding a solution. "There's not much concern because I think we know where we need to work," he said, adding, "We have 500 employees at JGR working very hard to make sure we're going to be fast when it really counts at the end of the season, and until then, we've got to just do what we did today, and that's get a good finish and stay as high in the points as we can. That way when we have cars that can win, we can capitalize on those moments."

As so often seems to happen to teams in the midst of a losing streak, Sunday turned into a comedy of errors for two Gibbs drivers. Pole starter Matt Kenseth got stuck in traffic by a slow pit stop after leading the first 163 laps, then cut a tire. Busch admirably recovered from a pit road speeding penalty and was running second to eventual winner Logano when he missed the commitment line at the pit entrance by several inches on the last trip down the pit road, garnering another penalty.

Then there's that stage racing problem. This year's format penalizes slow starts and a lack of raw speed. After getting off to slow starts in the points in part due to poor stage results, the Gibbs drivers were penalized further by their low points positions when rain determined the starting order on two tracks where the team usually runs well: Martinsville and Bristol. Kenseth's postseason bonus point for winning the first stage Sunday was only the second such point for the Gibbs team this season after Busch earned one in the Daytona 500.

In what was a forecast of the season to come, JGR's stage strategy backfired big time at Daytona, where the cars appeared to have the necessary speed but got lost in the draft after a group pit stop went askew during the second stage. Plate racing is next at Talladega Superspeedway and another shot for JGR to right itself.

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