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Mathematically, Joe Gibbs Racing takes an advantage into this weekend’s NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championship finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway (Sun., 2:30 p.m. ET, NBC, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
Two JGR Toyotas versus a single Ford (Joey Logano) and a single Chevrolet (Jimmie Johnson) will decide the 2016 title.
Yet, according to the JGR crew chiefs Wednesday, they will approach the weekend with team goals equal to a singular pursuit for NASCAR glory. A possible Carl Edwards or Kyle Busch championship, they insisted, is a team trophy — no matter which driver takes the checkered flag first to hoist the hardware.
In theory, anyway.
“It’s something we talked about all year, we do, we share everything here at Joe Gibbs Racing,” Edwards’ crew chief Dave Rogers explained Wednesday. “It’s an open‑notebook policy.
“We try to help each other, and we talked about it. The goal was to make sure that four Gibbs cars went to Homestead with a shot at winning the championship. It got narrowed down to two, but this is a scenario we talked about long before this race. How do we race? Once we get to that final race, how do we race? And our agreement all year was: nothing changes.
“We have two cars going down there so we have a 50 percent chance a championship comes back to JGR,” he emphasized. “That’s the No. 1 goal.
“(Busch crew chief) Adam (Stevens), the 18 and the 19, we’re going to battle as hard as we can to win, but we’re going to do it the same way we have all year. We’re going to help each other. We’re going to try to settle it on the racetrack, but the main goal is that the championship comes back to JGR.”
Of course, it remains to be seen how well the Gibbs drivers will work together this weekend, but everyone appears to be in sync. And there is good precedent. Drivers and crew chiefs have not only steadfastly insisted that teamwork is the key to success, they have shown it — successfully at perhaps the most unpredictable venue of all, Talladega Superspeedway.
There, Gibbs driver Denny Hamlin finished third to advance to the Chase’s Round of 8 and his three teammates ran together all afternoon, finishing safely nose-to-tail-to-nose and securing their berths in the penultimate round.
The philosophy has worked and the Gibbs team is the only organization with multiple cars vying for the championship Sunday afternoon.
“I guess that’s the beauty of it — Adam and I, neither one of us drive the race cars,” Rogers said. “That’s settled on the racetrack, and that’s the way we want it. That’s the way our fans want it. They want to see the action on the racetrack.
“Ultimately, everyone at Joe Gibbs Racing would love to see Kyle and Carl duking it out at the end for the win. That would be a dream come true for this organization.
“But they’ve got to settle it themselves. One of the things I love about working for Coach Gibbs is despite what some people may think, there is no team order. The team order is to try to win. We’re going to try to win. We’re playing everything on top of the table. We’re not trying to undermine each other. But at the end of the day, it is a competition. Our pit crew is going to try to beat their pit crew. Our driver is going to try to beat their driver. There may be some strategy in play where one of us tries to short pit each other. That’s in the spirit of competition, but everything will be up front and on the table.
“But I know that the entire 18 team is going to be trying to beat the 19, Kyle included, and they know the same from the 19. It’s just a fun experience. It’s a great atmosphere here at Joe Gibbs Racing. We look forward to going down there and racing each other really hard.”