Ty Gibbs had his best race of the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series season at Las Vegas, scoring a fifth-place finish after running inside the top 10 for much of the day. The result was even more impressive because the team had to overcome a late self-inflicted issue when a tire got away outside of the pit box and sent the young driver to the rear of the field.
This week on his “Happy Hour” podcast, Kevin Harvick talked about Gibbs’ performance, and then unexpectedly brought up something about the race that no one else had talked about on the broadcast or any podcast during the week – the driver controlling his frustration.
“You know that I’m on the Ty Gibbs train,” Harvick said. “I think he’s going to win. I mean, he was frustrated with his teammate this weekend on the radio with Martin Truex and the way that they were jerking those cars around and you could visually see the frustration with the maneuvers that they were doing with the car and radio backed that up.
“With Ty, he’s got the speed and I think if he can just stay off the radio, I think it would do him a lot of favors if he could just learn how to yell at himself. I think that would go a long ways with him because then he wouldn’t have to answer all the questions during the week about something that he said.”
Ty Gibbs Gets Into It With Joey Logano
Harvick’s remarks about Gibbs should be a red flag for the young driver and the organization that bears his last name because this is already the second time this year that the JGR driver’s actions have been worthy of discussion.
The first came after the Clash when the No. 54 pilot rekindled his conflict with Joey Logano, which initially started in 2023 at Martinsville. According to the two-time champion, the feud between the pair actually began several races before that when the Penske driver claimed that Gibbs used him up multiple times before he repaid him back at The Paperclip.
After that incident, Logano said on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio that he and Gibbs talked.
“Ty called me afterwards, which I respected,” he said. “We had a conversation, came to my place, and we talked for about 30 minutes. I thought, ‘Man, that was pretty cool.’
“He was very humble. We had a good conversation about it. I thought I’ve been through a lot of this stuff before when I was like him, right? I can see a lot of myself in Ty. So I was open. I’ve been through this before. Let me see if I can help the situation out.
“So we left and shook hands and said, ‘OK, here is how we’re going to do it. We’re going to respect each other on the racetrack. We’re going to respect each other.'”
That conversation didn’t help as Gibbs ran the No. 22 car high in the waning laps of the Clash and Logano confronted the young driver at his hauler after the race.
If Gibbs and Truex talked, that will likely stay within the walls of JGR. But based on what has happened in the first four races in 2024, that’s likely not the last time we hear about Gibbs in some sort of disagreement with another driver.