“The beginning and the middle part of the year, sometimes those wins were just too easy. ... And then the Chase started, and it's gone.”
KYLE BUSCH
Of course, the Gibbs team has been here before. The outfit placed three drivers in last year's championship Chase, led by Busch, who entered the playoff having won a series-best eight races and led the points for 17 consecutive weeks. But once there, he never had a chance. Neither did Hamlin or Tony Stewart, Logano's predecessor. Parts failures, crashes, cut tires, missed setups, speeding penalties -- they all combined to make for a miserable final 10 weeks for members of the Gibbs trio, none of whom finished any higher than eighth.
For a team with three championships, it was an unacceptable result. So in early December, the team began a series of organization-wide meetings that reviewed everything from people to processes to equipment. The reliability of car parts, the fuel efficiency of engines, the structure of how the engineering department supports the race teams -- nothing was overlooked. People were moved, policies were altered, focus was sharpened. The goal was to ensure that if Gibbs drivers make this year's Chase, they'll have the means to finish the job and claim the team's first title since 2005.
"You put a plan in place, until you see that plan come to fruition and work, you don't know," said Jimmy Makar, the team's vice president of racing operations. "But I think we're going to be able to certainly answer questions faster and take care of problems quicker."
Anything would be an improvement from last year. Busch entered the Chase as the clear favorite to win the title, but was derailed by a broken suspension piece, a blown engine and a fuel-pressure problem in the first three races. Hamlin entered in seventh, and was doomed by a drive shaft failure at Dover, a blown tire at Talladega, and a missed setup at Texas. Stewart entered 10th, and suffered a tire problem at Martinsville and crashes at Kansas, Texas and Phoenix. The Gibbs drivers wound up as the final three to qualify for places at the season-ending banquet in New York, a fact Hamlin even noted in his speech. "Yeah, eighth, ninth, 10th -- that's about the way our year's gone," he said on stage
Much of what happened to the Gibbs drivers last year -- tire problems and crashes, most notably -- wasn't necessarily anyone's fault. But then there were the equipment problems. And a few pit-road speeding penalties. And other issues that rapidly turned the Chase into a morass that swallowed the team's championship hopes.
"Some of that is beyond your control. That's life," team president J.D. Gibbs said. "Some of it is, how do you do a better job being prepared? We had a few issues during the year, and the fact that they all hit at the end was discouraging. Part of that was just chance, and part of that was I think that we just weren't prepared properly. You go back, and I think we did as good a job as anybody preparing our cars and our guys for the race. but there are a few things you can learn. I think we learned a few things -- hey, cross your t's and dot your i's a little better next time."
The meetings to address the root of Gibbs' Chase crash began shortly after last year's awards banquet, and those who were there say they weren't for the meek. "I think it was a lot of people who had to swallow their pride, you could say," Hamlin said. The disappointment was heightened by the knowledge that Busch had been the class of the field for two-thirds of the season, only to wind up 10th through no real fault of his own. Many opinions were voiced. Busch provided insight as to how some things were done at Hendrick Motorsports, his employer the previous season and winner of the past three championships. There clearly was an urgency, Makar said, to get things figured out.
"We all want to be better," said crew chief Greg Zipadelli, who worked with Stewart last year and now oversees Logano's program. "Whether you're willing to make the effort, speak your mind, maybe put yourself out there by yourself because other people may not agree with you or whatever, that's the important part. I think us as crew chiefs did that, I think our engineering group did that, I think our owners kind of held us accountable for how we ran in the Chase and wanted to know what we needed to do differently to be better. If we are in that situation again, we want to be able to capitalize on it, or at last feel we had more of a shot at it. We just didn't do a good job."
Team owner Joe Gibbs said five specific areas were addressed. Although he wouldn't name the areas, reliability was clearly at the top of the list. Nothing hampered the 2008 Gibbs Chase effort more than parts failures, specifically the three consecutive weeks of mechanical trouble that turned Busch from championship favorite into also-ran.
"Our No. 1 focus this year is more reliability than it is speed," Hamlin said. "If we were to be just average, we'd have been better off. This past year was the worst average finish I've had in my career. But yet, we ran the best during the [Chase] races. That's backward. Just backward. We've got to get back to the reliability we had two years ago."
J.D. Gibbs said the parts problems the team suffered during last year's Chase were all in-house issues. This year the organization is operating under revised standards as to how far a piece of equipment can be pushed.
"Obviously it's something we haven't had a lot of problems with traditionally, but for whatever reason, we got snake-bit toward the end of the season," Makar said. "And even during the season, there were some oddball things that happened to us. We were pushing parts and pieces a little harder than we ever had in the past technology-wise and in the way we use them or abuse them. I think it made everybody realize that we had to stay aware of where we were when we were on that threshold of pushing parts farther than they needed to be pushed. I think they felt good that we addressed it and had a plan put together to go forward."
“This past year was the worst average finish I've had in my career. But yet, we ran the best during the [Chase] races. That's backward. Just backward.”
DENNY HAMLIN
Another issue was fuel mileage. Series runner-up Carl Edwards of Roush Fenway Racing was often able to stretch his fuel runs to his advantage, and the Gibbs team simply couldn't keep up. One reason why, Makar surmised, is that Gibbs was in its first season with Toyota, and still probing the limits of what the manufacturer's engine could do. Still, he said engineers tackled the problem in-depth during the winter.
"We've been in positions where we're very good with that stuff, but obviously going with Toyota [last] year, we didn't have the experience that we had with our GM stuff," Makar said. "It's a whole new learning curve, and we found some issues we needed to work on. It's not an excuse, it's new. We had to figure out how to make that better."
There also was some reorganization of personnel, specifically to assemble what Makar calls a "competition group" that aids the race team on location during event weekends. At the request of crew chiefs, some engineers were moved from the shop to the road in order to provide the race programs with dedicated help. The result is better information on which to make decisions. "The race teams felt like they needed a little more direct support for what their needs were, so we organized some stuff inside engineering, took some people out of the shop, and structured that to what we felt was best for us," Makar said.
Although Busch appears to have picked up right where he left off this past September, and Hamlin has shown flashes of title-contender strength, the true impact of the changes the Gibbs team has implemented won't be evident until the organization returns to the Chase. Even so, Busch said, sometimes a 5-cent part breaks no matter how much preparation and research goes into it. There's no defense against bad luck.
"The last 10 races weren't fun at all," Busch said, referring to his 2008 campaign. "The beginning and the middle part of the year, sometimes those wins were just too easy. It was like wow, that wasn't as hard as it should have been. You look at it, and you look at why, and it's because a lot of things fell your way. The luck was there. Then you start running out of luck a little bit, and you're like, we're losing it here. It's going away. And then the Chase started, and it's gone. We had none. There is a certain amount of luck you have to have in this game, and no matter what you do to try to change it, you can't just all of the sudden get it back."
But the Gibbs team is trying to control what it can, attempting to squeeze better reliability out of its parts, better fuel-efficiency out of its engines, and better use out of its people. The lessons of the past fall were humbling ones for an organization that was once the best in NASCAR. No one has forgotten them.
"I think sometimes when you get knocked around at the end of the year, it kind of sets your jaw," Joe Gibbs said. "Nobody here is confident or cocky."
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