Missing out on the Playoffs and victory lane in your rookie season is nothing to be ashamed of, but Ty Gibbs made it a mission to not repeat the same missteps he made in his debut year.
A strong qualifying effort at the LA Clash didn’t translate to an equally strong result as he came home 18th of 23 cars, so he went into Speedweeks with something to prove.
Gibbs ended his duel race in 8th, giving him a 15th-place starting spot for Sunday’s main event. Though he wasn’t a factor in the first two stages, he kept his #54 Monster Energy Toyota clean to contend.
With less than 10 laps to go, Gibbs sat fifth in line on the top before Hendrick teammates William Byron and Alex Bowman set off The Big One heading into turn 3. Gibbs’s Toyota became glued to his teammate Denny Hamlin through the crash prior to sliding down the banking and into the infield grass.
Ty was able to continue despite the damage to end his second Daytona 500 in 17th. From there, the 21-year-old racer went on an absolute heater over the next five races.
It started in Atlanta where a lap 2 pileup did little to slow down the heir to the Joe Gibbs Racing throne as he wheeled his Monster machine to 10th when the checkered flag fell.
He kept up the momentum in Vegas the following week where he collected points in stage 1 on his way to his first top-5 of the season while Kyle Larson and Tyler Reddick ran away from the rest of the field.
Gibbs took a front-row starting spot the next week and parlayed it into significant laps led in the desert before ceding the advantage to Reddick before the end of the first stage. From there, the sophomore driver pulled off a second straight top-5 finish in Phoenix, finishing behind teammate Christopher Bell and Chris Buescher.
At Bristol, Ty put on a show in his SiriusXM Camry, sweeping the stages in a race marred by tire issues. While his car was stout on the short run, Gibbs struggled with managing his tires and fell back to ninth by race’s end, a lap off the pace of teammates Denny Hamlin and Martin Truex Jr.
Another front-row start at COTA saw the young Gibbs pace himself on the way to his second podium result in three races, but four consecutive middling efforts at Richmond, Martinsville, Texas, and Talladega dropped him from second in points all the way down to eighth.
Gibbs rebounded from this poor stretch with a top-10 at Dover before sinking down to 32nd at Kansas after notching stage points in both stages for the first time since Bristol.
Thanks to Reddick and Buescher’s clash at the end of the Goodyear 400, Gibbs cemented his best race yet as a Cup driver, earning 17 stage points and logging an impressive runner-up finish at the Lady in Black.
Ty took that great run into All-Star Weekend where he took the pole en route to a win in the Open for the second year in a row, giving him a chance to run with the series’ best. Despite the momentum, Gibbs’ car didn’t adjust to nighttime well, only rising to 13th by the time Joey Logano took the victory.
After earning his first career pole for the World 600, Gibbs paced the field for much of stage 1 prior to falling back toward the end of the second stage. Rather than let his lack of track position discourage him, Gibbs motored back through the pack to claim a sixth-place result by the time the humidity came.
A pedestrian 11th-place effort at Gateway followed before disaster struck in northern California where he ran solidly in the top-10 before clipping the inside wall in the turn 11 hairpin, ripping his right-front wheel off the hub and ruining his day just 16 laps into the 110-lap event.
His results improved a smidge the next week in Iowa where he kept the car clean but lacked pace, ending the inaugural event two laps down in 25th. A similar lack of pace followed Ty to Loudon and the Music City where he placed 16th and 23rd, respectively.
Through the deluge and changing race distance, Ty Gibbs held a steady wheel on the streets of Chicago, parlaying his front-row starting spot into yet another third-place finish.
Gibbs and crew chief Chris Gayle put together a solid piece for Pocono the following week where they sat on the pole before a blown engine in stage 3 put them out of the race. Forgettable days in Indianapolis and Richmond knocked him out of the top-10 in points for just the third time all season.
With just three races remaining in the regular season, Gibbs needed to find his way to victory lane or maximize his points in order to solidify his postseason spot. This started with a sensational run at Michigan where the young driver finished 3rd for the fourth time and snatched up critical points in stage 2.
Though Ty missed out on stage points at Daytona, his second-straight top-5 virtually locked him in prior to the regular season finale in Darlington. His nine stage points and 20th-place effort in the Southern 500 were enough to earn the first Playoff bid of his young Cup Series career.
Atlanta gave him a great chance to secure his first career victory in the Quaker State 400, taking in a fair amount of points in both stages before taking the lead with 27 laps to go. Unfortunately for Gibbs, a Walmart banner in explicably fell on the track while he was running in third with 11 laps to go.
The restart didn’t go as he’d hoped either as he kept his car planted on the bottom of the track while all his competitors elected to take the high road, dropping Gibbs all the way to 17th in the final running order.
Points in stage 2 at Watkins Glen failed to bolster a mediocre 22nd-place effort, putting the sophomore racer below the cutline heading into the Bass Pro Shops Night Race at Bristol.
For much of the race, it appeared Gibbs’ Monster Toyota would do just enough to advance after garnering points in the first stage, but as the laps wound down, he encountered the lapped car of Daniel Suarez.
Suarez needed to beat Gibbs in points to make it to the next round and didn’t make it easy on the young driver to navigate around his ill-handling Chevy. By the time the race came to its conclusion, Gibbs wound up 15th, leaving him a handful of points short of advancing to the Round of 12.
After charging to a top-5 in Kansas, the rest of Gibbs’ season quickly turned into a nightmare as the #54 team slumped over the season’s final five events, never finishing higher than 30th.
A blown engine at the Roval and multiple incidents at Vegas and Homestead were precursors to a painfully slow 500-lap affair at Martinsville for the #54. To top it all off, Ty lost control of his car in the opening laps at the finale in Phoenix, ending his second season with a dead-last finish.
Over his final five races, Gibbs earned just 25 points, a mark he equaled or surpassed on 16 different occasions throughout the 2024 season.
What Went Wrong
A theory initially posited by Jackson Todd dictates that most Cup Series drivers take around 100 starts to get their footing at the highest level and start winning races. While this doesn’t ring true for every driver, there are multiple recorded instances of this happening in recent years.
While Ty tore up the Xfinity Series on his way to a title in his rookie season, he has struggled at points in his Cup Series career, though there’s nothing I can definitively point to where Gibbs’ season went “wrong”.
Ty came into the Cup Series full-time in 2023 with all of the main members of his Xfinity Series team, including crew chief Chris Gayle. Ideally, this should’ve helped the rookie acclimate to the premier stock-car series in the world faster than most racers, but it just hasn’t worked out that way.
Gibbs remains an elite talent in this sport; he’s just inexperienced. With more seasoning, Ty Gibbs still shows the flashes and tools to have an enduring and successful Cup career, and with the benefit of his grandfather owning the team that employs him, Gibbs is likely to have endless opportunities to find his footing.
Looking Ahead to 2025
As was discussed earlier, Gibbs snared his first career pole at Charlotte in 2024, which will also be the venue of his 100th career Cup start. Toyota’s dominance on the intermediate tracks can’t be overstated, and it looks like Ty really knows how to work his way around that facility.
That’s not to say he won’t win a race before then because he’s shown strength at Vegas and Kansas that pop up earlier in the schedule. However, if I were to predict the site of his first victory, it would be at the same track and event that played host to Bobby Labonte’s victory back in 1995.
Chris Gayle has taken his talents over to the #11 team with Denny Hamlin, leaving Gibbs to be paired with longtime JGR engineer Tyler Allen. It’s anyone’s guess as to whether this combination works since Allen has so few races under his belt as the man at the helm.
If I had to make a projection, I’d say Gibbs winds up with two wins and gets bounced in the Round of 12. A mark of improvement but still firmly outside the top echelon of drivers.
Races Ty Could Win: Kansas spring, World 600, Chicago Street Course
(Top Photo Credit: Nigel Kinrade Photography)
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