NASCAR insider: 'Ty Gibbs is on a historic run of crappiness'

It’s been a horrific start to the season for Ty Gibbs, whose highest finish so far has been a 16th-place finish at the Daytona 500. Everything else has been an abject disaster.

On Sunday at Phoenix, Gibbs went down to a mechanical issue, with a brake rotor ruining his day. It was yet another mishap for a crew that’s becoming all too familiar with them.

NASCAR insider Jeff Gluck of The Athletic highlighted how bad things are on The Teardown podcast. Gibbs’ last top-15 finish came back on October 6, 2024. It’s been a while.

“Ty Gibbs is on like a historic run of crappiness right now,” Gluck said. “Just like unbelievably. His results have been just horrible. Absolutely horrible. And today apparently they had a brake rotor that went bad and caused that last caution there.”

Gibbs was also part of one of the biggest crashes of the day at Phoenix. Though Chase Briscoe eventually took fault for the crash, Gibbs coming up the low side of the track helped cause contact between Briscoe and Justin Haley. Eventually that sent the field spinning.

That Gibbs was able to work his way out of that one was a minor miracle. Then disaster struck anyway.

“Just absolutely miserable. He is 34th in points,” Gluck said. “As bad as things have been for Brad Keselowski, things have been worse for Ty Gibbs. I mean it’s just, he is the third-to-lowest full-time driver right now. Nothing can go right for that team. It’s pretty crazy.”

Is it too early to panic? Maybe not.

“The Ty Gibbs thing concerns me because the performance hasn’t been there,” said Jordan Bianchi, Gluck’s co-host on the podcast. “It’s not like they’re running exceptionally well and then things are going wrong. Now that said, he started off bad today. He was running as high as I think 13th before the brake rotor. They rallied nice, got down a lap, came back, got up to I think 13th when they had the mechanical issue. Still, if you compare his performance to his other team, not well. The 11’s running well. We know the 20’s running well. The 19 seems to be OK. The 54’s got issues.”

Worse, the subpar performance from Ty Gibbs comes after a big change this offseason. The team brought in a new crew chief to help spark things after Gibbs seemed somewhat stalled out.

If anything, that move is looking even more questionable now. Bianchi explained.

“Now part of why they made a crew chief change over the offseason was they needed a new voice on that team,” Bianchi said. “He and Chris Gayle had been together for some years and Ty needed a different voice in his ear. That team, for lack of a better term, stagnant. It just felt like they had gone as far as they were going to go. They needed a change of direction. They have not had it. Is it time to pull the alarm and be worried? Maybe a little bit.”

Still, the outlook for Ty Gibbs can change in a hurry. He’s a talented enough driver to make that possible.

He’s also got the support of one of NASCAR’s best teams. He just needs a change in the winds.

“I think, listen, you’re with Joe Gibbs Racing,” Bianchi said. “He’s still a really good driver. You’re just going through this stretch right now and you’re going to have these moments where things go wrong and you’re like, ‘What can we do to get out of this?’ He needs to figure this out, though. You need to start stringing together good finishes, because this isn’t just like ‘Oh, new crew chief/driver combination. We’re going through the motions trying to figure this all out.

“This goes back, because you ran through the numbers. This goes back to last fall and it even goes back even further than the numbers you said in terms of qualifying well, in terms of running well, in terms of laps led. It’s just not been there for right now, and it hasn’t been there for a while. That’s eyebrow-raising.”