By Jenna Fryer
Associated Press
CHARLOTTE ó Joe Gibbs Racing used the first 26 races this season to establish itself as NASCAR’s top organization.
It took just two races to undo all that work.
Two terrible showings to start the Chase for the championship led Kyle Busch to concede his title hopes Sunday after his engine failed at Dover International Speedway. Denny Hamlin didn’t wave a white flag, but his 38th-place finish has him stuck at the bottom of the standings with his teammate.
Timing, it seems, is everything, and the wheels are most certainly falling off JGR’s season at the worst possible part of the year.
“About what you would imagine,” team president J.D. Gibbs said Monday when asked the mood at the race shop. “I’d say there’s a good amount of frustration and disappointment. It’s obviously very frustrating because you work so hard all year. So it’s frustrating for the drivers, for the crews, for the 400-plus people at the shop ó everyone who puts everything they have into this ó and then the small things bite you.
“But stuff like that happens in life. We don’t like it, we don’t have to like it, but we have to work through it.”
Problem is, there’s not much time to work through this.
Busch started the Chase with an 80-point advantage over most of the competition. Two races in and he’s plummeted to last, 210 points behind new leader Carl Edwards with just eight events to make up the difference. Hamlin sits in 11th and two-time Cup champion Tony Stewart is clinging to his title hopes in seventh.
“Look, all you want is a chance in the final race, and I haven’t sat down and looked at all the points and all the scenarios,” Gibbs said. “But we’re not giving up on having a final chance in that last race.”
He’ll have trouble convincing Busch of that, though.