Before Denny Hamlin’s breakthrough win at Richmond last weekend, Joe Gibbs Racing as a whole had been surprisingly absent from Victory Lane this season at the Cup Series level. But the organization’s toughest days could be behind it after JGR placed all four of its cars in the top nine at Richmond. Does it only get better from here for JGR, beginning this weekend at Martinsville? “We learned something leaving Phoenix that we’re going to move forward to here with,” Hamlin crew chief Chris Gabehart said of last month’s race in the Arizona desert. “Listen, Richmond is great track for our company, it’s a great track for our drivers. But it feels good to get it right as a company. For me, while not getting into details, what I keep telling everybody, what I’m looking forward to most is I know we’re not at our best right now. There’s a lot of things internally we’ve got to get better. We’re on a road to doing it. It’s nice to win in spite of that, to be honest.”
JGR driver Martin Truex Jr., who finished a season-best fourth at Richmond, is similarly hopeful that JGR is about to turn the proverbial corner or at least making progress toward that end. “There is a lot that goes into it. One of the biggest things for us has been not showing up on weekends close enough,” Truex said, referring to where his race car stacks up to the competition. “Not a lot of people have talked about the (weekend) schedule, but it’s 15 minutes of practice, literally impound racing, and you can’t change springs and major setup components during practice, so basically what you show up with you fine tune with wedge and shock clicks and small adjustments, and then you go racing. Really, if you are off, you are off. I think for us, that’s a big thing. We’re simulator racing right now. We’ve been behind throughout testing, and I feel like that has definitely hurt us, so we are definitely searching and at this point doing some testing.”