NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
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CUP: Year Of Change, Challenge For JGR
Joe Gibbs Racing is going through major changes for 2012...
Tom Jensen  |  Posted January 08, 2012   Charlotte, NC
Denny Hamlin won just once in 2011. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
In 2011, six different teams placed drivers in the Chase for the Sprint Cup, NASCAR’s championship round.

Of those six, none came away more disappointed than Joe Gibbs Racing, the team that has won three Cup championships since 2000. And no top team will be under the microscope more at the beginning of 2012 than JGR will, as it looks to return to championship form.

All told, JGR won just four races in 2011, its lowest total since 2007, with drivers Denny Hamlin and Kyle Busch finishing ninth and 12th, respectively, in points and Joey Logano sliding from 16th in points in 2010 to 24th last year.

On track, the JGR squad lacked the performance is showed in 2010, when Hamlin nearly won the championship. On top of that, there were myriad issues that caused the team problems: Getting caught with “unapproved” oil pans at Michigan designed to give the cars a lower center of gravity in the front end; a stunning 16 engine failures in practice, qualifying and races; and, of course, the Kyle Busch Texas debacle, where he was parked for the weekend after deliberately wrecking Ron Hornaday Jr. under caution in a NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race.

So for 2012, there are plenty of changes.

Greg Zipadelli, who had been crew chief of the No. 20 JGR Cup car since Tony Stewart was a rookie in 1999, left to rejoin Stewart at Stewart-Haas Racing. Zipadelli will be replaced by Jason Ratcliff, who won two championships as a crew chief in JGR’s NASCAR Nationwide Series operation.

Mike Ford, the only crew chief Hamlin had since he was a rookie in 2006, was released after the season and replaced by Darian Grubb, who led Stewart to the 2011 Cup championship.

JGR is discontinuing building its own engines, and for 2012 will receive ones built by TRD, U.S.A., Toyota’s racing arm in America. TRD also provides engines for Michael Waltrip Racing and other Toyota teams.

As for the mercurial Busch, 2012 will be a pivotal season. On Jan. 19, he will announce the driver and car lineup for his Kyle Busch Motorsports NASCAR Nationwide Series team. After the Texas incident, Busch is expected to greatly scale back his driving in the Nationwide and Truck Series, with Jason Leffler rumored to be driving the No. 18 KBM truck.

Although there are many questions ahead this season for JGR as a whole, Hamlin is optimistic about returning to championship contention after a year in which he struggled badly with his self-confidence.

“I think our cars will get better,” he said. “I think that they already are getting better. We’ve seen year over year if something happens in those two months when there’s no racing, teams find things and other teams lose things. I’ve done testing at different race tracks trying to work on our program and getting it better. I am very happy with the direction we are heading.”

As for Busch, he’s yet to finish higher than eighth in points since joining JGR in 2008 and only one of his 23 career Sprint Cup victories has come in a Chase race, and that was back in his rookie season of 2005.
Kyle Busch had an uneven season in 2011 and stumbled in the Chase. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

“All in all, (there) were certainly some highs, and some lows were just not having the right 10 races again,” Busch said of his 2011 season. “It seems like we just can’t seem to figure out the Chase thing. It was what it was and we’ll move on to 2012.”

One additional challenge for JGR is institutional knowledge: With the demise of Red Bull, JGR and Michael Waltrip Racing are the only two multi-car Toyota teams realistically capable of winning at this point.

“We’d like to make sure that we are a little bit more competitive week in and week out,” Busch said. “It’s so hard to do because we only have so many Toyota teams out there. There’s only like six or seven. It makes it a little more challenging on us to not have more teams to bounce ideas off of. When you’re Chevy, you’ve got 15 of them and when you’re Ford you’ve got like eight or 11 of them or something like that. Makes it to where you have more teams and you can bounce more ideas.”

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEED.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100.
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