With Jimmie Johnson winning and Dale Earnhardt Jr. finishing fifth in Sunday’s O’Reilly Auto Parts 500 at Texas Motor Speedway, the naysayers finally can stop asking “what’s wrong with Hendrick Motorsports?”
But those same naysayers can continue asking “what’s wrong with Joe Gibbs Racing?”
Sunday marked the second time this season that JGR has failed to have even one of its NASCAR Cup drivers finish in the top 10 (the other time was the Daytona 500).
Kyle Busch was the highest Texas finisher for the Gibbs camp at 15th place. Matt Kenseth was 16th, Daniel Suarez was 19th and Denny Hamlin was 25th.
That’s very uncharacteristic for a team that has six wins, 24 top-fives and 42 top-10s in 96 overall starts at the 1.5-mile speedway.
In addition to not having any wins in 2017, JGR has just one stage win. This, in comparison to 2016, when it had at least one top-10 in all 36 races.
Also in 2016, JGR won three of the first seven races, and seven of the first 12, en route to 12 total wins for the entire season.
Even team owner Joe Gibbs is mystified at what’s happened to his four-team NASCAR Cup operation.
“We just have a lot of issues,” Gibbs told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “This was as tough a day as we’ve had. I think Kyle [Busch] felt he had a chance early, and then we adjusted a little bit, and it went away.
“Denny was off. I think our other two cars were, too. So, what it really says is we’re off. We got a lot of work to do.”
Gibbs did not point to the recent repave at TMS as one of the reasons why his team struggled Sunday, he said to the Star-Telegram.
“It’s the same for everybody,” he said. “It was a real test of nobody having any information going in. It was who could handle it the best. Obviously, we didn’t.”
But what isn’t the same for everybody is how far and how quickly JGR has fallen. In 2015 and 2016, the organization led all of its peers with 26 combined wins. No other rival organization had more than 14 wins during the same period.
In 2014, JGR managed just two wins in the entire season, one apiece by Busch and Hamlin.
In addition, the last time JGR went without at least one victory in the first seven races of a season was back in 2007, when it didn’t notch its first win until July 1 at New Hampshire, the 17th race of that season.
