From career crossroads to title shot with Hamlin, Gayle savors his JGR journey

Denny Hamlin has driven race cars for Coach Joe Gibbs ever since the 2005 season. No driver on the NASCAR Cup Series roster outranks him in terms of longevity and loyalty to one team.

Coincidentally enough, one of the closest connections on Hamlin's No. 11 Toyota team has him beat in terms of workplace service anniversaries at JGR.

"Like, I know everybody, right?" says No. 11 crew chief Chris Gayle. "Like, I've not quite outlasted everybody, but a lot. So it does feel like home, and that's the real reason why, to be quite honest with you, there was a lot of tough decisions I had to make last offseason."

Gayle was faced with a crossroads before this pivotal season, one that will end with a title shot in Sunday's season finale (3 p.m. ET, NBC, Peacock, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, NBC Sports App) at Phoenix Raceway. The 50-year-old veteran seriously considered leaving the only big-league team he's ever worked for, even though entertaining offers from other teams potentially meant starting over at this stage of his career. By staying, he was still faced with a reboot.

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Hamlin was in a similar place. Chris Gabehart, his crew chief for the previous six seasons, was due for promotion to JGR competition director, and Hamlin's bond with the No. 11 team's philosophical, longtime leader was set to change in the twilight of his career. "Shocked" was how Hamlin described it on the cold morning before the NASCAR Awards banquet last November, but he ultimately left the decision in Gibbs' hands.

Gibbs said the move was a needed jolt after his four-car team went winless in the second half of the 2024 season. From his experience as a Hall of Famer in both the NFL and NASCAR, he knew that stagnation in an ever-evolving sport could be harmful. "If you're sitting still, you're falling behind," Gibbs said this week. "You've got to be on the forefront of what's taking place."

Hamlin ultimately placed his faith in Gibbs' personnel move. The next step was building that same degree of trust between driver and crew chief.

"My reaction there, it was twofold," Gayle said, thinking back to last November. "I was super-excited about working with an experienced guy, to be in the situation I'm in now, but I also knew that to make that work, I had to have buy-in from Denny, or it wasn't going to work. And so, there were a few days there when Denny's kind of mulling over, 'Oh, man, I don't really want to rebuild everything. I've been doing this for a while. Do I want to start over? That's not really what I want to do,' and ultimately, I think Coach let him think about that, and the ultimate response that I have always heard was, I trust you. Denny said he trusts Coach, that he'll make the right decision and you're going to do what's best for me. So then I left it at that."

That trust has been rewarded in a banner season for one of stock-car racing's elite teams, which stacked up a series-best six wins and established a performance benchmark for the rest of the field. A self-assured march through the playoffs has placed both Hamlin and Gayle in position for their first Cup Series championship -- not bad for a Year 1 partnership with an origin story cloaked by so much uncertainty.

To further sustain that level of confidence between the two, Gayle sat down with Hamlin and reviewed what would be expected. Gayle eventually came to learn the extent of his new driver's determination and analytical attention to detail. Hamlin initially thought of his new crew chief as "reserved," but that pre-loaded impression gave way to regarding him as smart, decisive and thorough in his preparation. A meticulous nature would be their common ground.

Making that transition even smoother was Gayle's choice to keep the core of the No. 11 team intact. Rebuilding the driver-crew chief pairing was plenty, without the potential disruption of swapping engineers, mechanics and other crew members.

"It was just me getting changed," Gayle says. "I felt a lot more at ease at that point."

* * *

As a personal part of Tuesday team meetings at Joe Gibbs Racing -- where all six pit crews, coaches and shop employees gather -- one attendee tells the group their story of how they made it to NASCAR. Three weeks ago, before the Cup Series visited Las Vegas Motor Speedway, it was Gayle's turn to share. His version, retold before on-track activity began a couple of weeks ago at Talladega Superspeedway, went something like this.

Digging all the way back to the beginning, Gayle still remembers the moment he became hooked on racing, back in his formative middle school to early high school years growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas. He and a buddy watched a neighbor open a garage door, revealing a purpose-built racer sitting idle, waiting for the weekend when it would be unleashed to carve up area dirt tracks.

From that point on, his interest in pursuing any other sports waned.

"So that was the path, right?" Gayle says. "And the parents laughed at me a little bit about thinking I could make it as a profession. But you know, it worked out OK."

He became involved in dirt-track racing to start, and his vocation-to-be stuck with him after he enrolled in the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Though his devotion to the Razorbacks was strong, he still felt the pull to a career in stock car racing. After a relationship with a girlfriend ended, his ties to his home state loosened as well. Gayle packed up his broken heart, his Chevy S-10 pickup and headed to Charlotte.

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A summer tour of the area prompted his move to Kannapolis in 1999. Gayle transferred to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte to study engineering, and he knocked on the doors of any race shop that would take his resume. An open garage door led him to Mark Reedy, a veteran of Big 10 Super Late Model competition at Concord Motorsports Park. More introductions followed: seating innovator Brian Butler, the Craig brothers and All Pro Series driver Jeff Fultz. Gayle did whatever was asked around the shops, balancing his school schedule with the on-the-job training.

Fresh out of college, he landed with Team Bristol Motorsports in the Busch Series, but the long hours on the understaffed team took its toll. So when an opening became available at Joe Gibbs Racing, he contacted Mark Catania, then a JGR engineer who had also spent time with the Craigs on the All Pro circuit. Catania put in a good word, and before the 2002 season, Gayle was a JGR employee -- a shock specialist with Coy Gibbs' team in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series.

"Then from there, I've been at Joe Gibbs Racing ever since," Gayle says. "So it's a long path there."

Gayle's first crew chief assignment came 11 years later in the Xfinity Series, spending two seasons with Elliott Sadler before working with several current Cup Series standouts as a rotating cast on JGR's "all-star" car. Wins came quickly while paired with those moonlighting veterans, including a staggering 10 victories in 17 races with Kyle Busch in 2016, but Gayle soon gained a reputation for shaping young talent in the Toyota development pipeline.

When Erik Jones was tapped for his first season in NASCAR's top division, Gayle became a Cup Series rookie alongside him with the JGR-affiliated Furniture Row Racing operation. Jones recalled Gayle as energetic and motivated in their four seasons together, saying with a laugh that he's since settled down some since those early "wound-up" years.

"In '17, that was his first role as a Cup crew chief with myself, and we were both going through a huge learning curve, looking back at it," said Jones, now in his ninth Cup season. "I was, obviously, with moving into the Cup world. He was, with working with a young guy in myself at the time, and a rookie in Cup. So we were both learning a lot as we were going through everything, but I do feel like he helped me. He helped me grow in that early, early part of my career and become a better driver and figure out what I needed to do to improve."

Gayle's next assignment meant returning to the Xfinity Series, but he was entrusted with bringing Ty Gibbs, the team owner's talented grandson, to NASCAR's national-series level. He was atop the pit box when the 18-year-old scored a stunning win in his Xfinity debut in 2021, and he guided Gibbs to seven victories and the series title the following year.

When Gibbs was destined for a Cup Series ride in 2023, Gayle was ready to make the move, too. His reputation as a rookie whisperer, however, had taken hold.

"Just because I'm probably a workaholic and those guys were not necessarily knowing, I would work myself to death trying to make sure they know everything, make sure that I'm not missing something," Gayle says. "And again, my background is not as a driver, so I'm trying to put myself in their shoes. I've worked with enough drivers, worked with enough people to where you can understand what they're looking for when you work with the good ones, and so you're just trying to help them because they don't know yet. They don't know what they don't know. And to be honest with you, when I was young at it, I didn't, either. You're just trying to cover every possible base."

That approach shifted with Hamlin. "I've been able to relax, knowing Denny knows what he needs, knowing he's going to come ask for it and knowing he's searching for it a lot on his own," Gayle says. "He's kind of refined what he thinks he needs, so I don't have to do quite as much of that, and I do a little more managing of the whole team and spending time in different areas."

Telling his story to the rest of the team gave Gayle a moment to reflect on his journey, a luxury that time usually doesn't afford crew members amid the bustle of frequent travel and tireless at-track work in a 40-week season. He also found the value in listening to others share their life and career experiences, and he's taken some of those best qualities and tried to adopt them as his own.

"Until you sit here in the midst of it and think about all the little steps that got you there," Gayle says, "it was kind of getting me thinking about the whole path, and like, wow, how far I've come, how many years I've been here, and a lot of stories about all the different roles at Joe Gibbs Racing, and how you kind of learn from all of them, how many crew chiefs I had worked under. ... I've thought about that over the last week-and-a-half more than I probably have in a long time."

* * *

Martinsville Speedway has long been regarded as one of Denny Hamlin's best tracks. The cozy, inviting venue in his home state had been the site of five previous wins for the Virginia native, but it had been a maddening 10 years since Hamlin had collected one of the track's grandfather clock trophies.

The next phase of the trust-building process for Hamlin and Gayle was about to get a sizable early test, one that the No. 11 team passed with a decidedly old-school performance , leading all but one of the last 275 laps and turning back the clock by about a decade. Hamlin was quick to credit Gayle on the cool-down lap, and he lauded the newfound approach with the car's setup, a departure from previous years.

"I mean, that certainly was a big one for me personally, and certainly one of the more special ones early in the season to get back in Victory Lane at that race track," Hamlin said. "So he knew how bad I wanted that race in particular, and for him to kind of trust my instincts on what I needed for overnight adjustments. That was key for us."

Their seventh race together survived the trust fall. From there, Gayle felt more relaxed making calls, and Hamlin found more comfort in letting him make them.

"Nothing really makes it solidify until you go win races," Gayle said, "and then when you win races, he's still got that seed of doubt, 'I'm willing to give you the chance,' but at the back of his mind, you've still got the seed of doubt until we go win. It's not the same. I think even though I don't think many of the team members would say that, I know they're probably thinking the same thing. It's just human nature, right? So for me, that was the thing. He at least gave me the rope to get there and let me prove that I deserve to be here."

Any other doubts about the partnership's promise were scuttled as more wins mounted up -- the next week at Darlington, a return to form at Michigan International Speedway , a delivery at Dover Motor Speedway , then two key postseason victories (Gateway , Las Vegas ) that helped him power through the playoff bracket and reach a career milestone with Cup Series win No. 60 .

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Those accomplishments have dwarfed what Gayle said were more modest preseason aspirations, with Hamlin aiming to win "two or three" races and reach the Championship 4 for the first time since 2021. The No. 11 team eclipsed the first part of those goals; now it has an opportunity to surpass the second on Sunday at Phoenix.

"I feel like we should have as good a shot as anybody," Gayle said before Talladega. "I feel like, I mean, I hate to say probably the favorite, but I think that that's probably the case, right?"

Gayle pointed to the team's familiarity with the tire setup, a solid baseline for the car's balance at Phoenix, plus the advantage of being locked in after Vegas, providing two extra weeks to divert the team's focus toward the final race. Gayle's nature should have the team prepared for the season's culmination and the title race, but he's also striving to embrace the moments as they come and reflect -- much as he did when telling his story to the team a few weeks back.

That story may get a whale of a capper this weekend, but Gayle says he's trying to enjoy the journey as much as the destination.

"Not once did we talk about once we got to the Championship 4, then winning the championship," Gayle said of his preseason goal-setting with Hamlin. "Now, maybe he just thought at that time that was going to be a good year and unrealistic to expect more than that. But no, for me, I'm going to stick with that. I'm trying to learn how to appreciate the moment -- right now -- and that's impossible to do completely because you're so involved with what you're trying to do that there's no way to remove yourself from the situation and completely do it, but I'm trying to do a nice balance of stopping a little bit, not letting it overwhelm me, and go, OK, you're in a good spot. We're ahead on things. Don't get so in the minutiae that you can't have a little fun with it."