Navigating the NASCAR Cup Series race at Thunder Valley on Sunday required a special kind of veteran experience or unparalleled skill. With tires failing, cars spinning, and debris clouding the field, four Toyotas managed to escape them all unscathed and enter their numbers in the top ten. The common factor between them? The name, Joe Gibbs Racing.
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The 500-lap race at ‘The Last Great Colosseum’ saw the drivers of Coach Gibbs excel despite the tire issues that brought hell to Bristol. Denny Hamlin emerged the winner with Martin Truex Jr. following him close on his heels in 2nd place. For all the talk of his greenness in the Cup Series, Ty Gibbs finished in 9th place after winning the first 2 stages. Christopher Bell, the Phoenix winner, came in 10th.
Together, the four drivers combined, to lead 383 laps on the day. What makes this performance particularly appealing is the fact that it comes atop the top-class show-off that the team put up at Phoenix the earlier Sunday. Bell won the race, Gibbs finished 3rd, and Truex Jr. 7th, and Hamlin 11th. That race answered a lot of questions about the caliber of Toyota’s new Camry XSE and the latest one has underlined those answers.
Joe Gibbs spoke to the media after the race and expressed his jubilance at watching his team dominate. “I was really proud from the standpoint of all of our cars,” he said as per Speedway Digest. “I think that’s the encouraging thing, is all four of ’em at different times obviously very fast. It’s a big deal for us.”
Denny Hamlin’s masterclass that led to Joe Gibbs Racing’s Bristol success
Sunday’s race was anything but the run-of-the-mill short-track race. The Bristol Motor Speedway’s officials had covered the oval surface with a new type of resin owing to the return to concrete racing, but unfortunately, neither teams nor Goodyear could forecast the effects of that. Little balls of rubber from the burned tires blanketed the corners and led to massive power drop-offs.
For an experienced driver like Denny Hamlin, this meant opportunity. Using the expertise of Chris Gabehart, he managed his tires like nobody else on the grid and led 163 laps. “That’s what I grew up here doing in the short tracks in the Mid-Atlantic, South Boston, Martinsville,” he said, as reported by Autoweek. “Once it became a tire management race, I really liked our chances.”
Following the back-to-back success in the race to the championship, Joe Gibbs and Co. will next travel to COTA. A different challenge will await the team then, but it won’t be anything that Coach’s men can’t handle.
