There’s more to young Gibbs than meets the eye
This wasn't the moment little Ty Gibbs knew he wanted to be a race-car driver, but it did let his parents know one important thing:
Whatever he was going to do in life, he'd be all in.
“He was like 3 maybe, my wife was driving the car home,” said his father, Coy. “She had put his bike in the trunk of the car, so by the time she gets to the back of the car, he's on his bike
and he tries to ride out of the back of the car and smashes his head on the ground.
“She calls me: ‘What am I going to do?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know. Call the ambulance.’ He had a huge knot on the side of his head. Obviously, not much scared him.”
From bicycles to go-karts to race cars — with the obligatory detour into football — Ty Gibbs channeled that drive and that toughness into quick success. Fifteen years after that nasty header in the driveway — the first of several — he is one of the most upwardly mobile drivers in stock-car racing.
The 18-year-old grandson of championship-winning NASCAR team owner and Pro Football Hall of Fame coach Joe Gibbs leads the ARCA Menards Series standings heading to the Milwaukee Mile. He’s also won three times this year in a limited NASCAR Xfinity schedule, including his debut.
Gibbs, who has taken the checkered flag in eight of the 15 ARCA races, sits a point ahead of six-race winner Corey Heim in a two-Toyota battle for the title. After they split two races last weekend, the competition resumes Sunday with the Sprecher 150, the ARCA national series’ first race at the Mile since 2007.
Coy Gibbs actually tried to lead Ty away from racing.
Coy had driven full time in NASCAR and brother J.D. also dabbled. He competed for two full seasons in the truck series and one in what was then the Busch Series with a top finish of third in truck races at Milwaukee and Texas in 2002. The climb was tough. Money was hard to find. After a few years, travel could turn a passion into a grind.
“He was around 11 years and my brother and my dad came to me,” Coy recalled. “My dad’s like, ‘I’ve got eight grandkids and one of them’s racing. That’s the one I want to race. We need him.’
“We were racing bicycles at the time. … I was like, ‘We already have a direction for him. Leave him alone.’ Over the next year, my brother and my dad just tortured him behind my back, and a year later my brother came to me and said, ‘Hey, look, we’ve got to sacrifice one of them and that’s the one we’re going to sacrifice.’ That’s exactly what he said.
“I finally gave up, because they’d already talked him into it behind my back and got him excited about it. I said, that’s fine. I’m not paying for it, and I’m not working on it. They’re like, ‘OK, done.’”
Almost immediately Ty went from traditional school to homeschooling and was quickly spending four days a week at karting tracks. The week he turned 14, the family had him in a late model. At 16, he scored his first ARCA victory.
“I remember my mom and my grandfather got together and put me and my cousin in a go-kart,” Gibbs said. “We made a couple of laps and I fell in love with it. I’ve been doing it ever since.
“There’s definitely a couple of paths I could have took, but I felt racing was the best opportunity for me. I’m not the biggest, tallest person, so football and basketball were eliminated pretty quickly.”
Since moving into ARCA part-time in 2019, Gibbs has won 16 of 42 starts, including a run of four straight from May into June this season.
In February Gibbs won his NASCAR Xfinity Series debut on the Daytona road course, and he has won two times since. Despite starting just 12 of the 22 races, Gibbs is tied for third on the win list this season (with AJ Allmendinger and behind JGR teammate Kyle Busch and defending champion Austin Cindric) and sits 14th in points.
So say what you will about the level of competition in ARCA, Gibbs has acquitted himself well at the next level already. He’ll move to the Xfinity Series full-time in 2022.
“He’s really good at feedback, giving us information that’s going to help us go faster,” said Mark McFarland, the crew chief on Gibbs’ No. 18 ARCA entry. “That’s where he’s really improved.
“I’ve had him for the past three years now. The first year we were just learning. The second year you could really tell he had it and he gave really good feedback and knew exactly what he wanted in his car to be good. Then he’s just got talent. He’s got natural talent that he can drive.”
Although Gibbs missed many typical teen activities like school dances and Friday night football games, he insists he is more than one-dimensional.
He’s a “super big” NBA fan, possibly because the Charlotte Hornets’ arena is a lot closer to home than the stadium of his grandfather’s longtime employer, the Washington Football Team. He ranks his priorities in life as God (the clear No. 1) and then family and racing (Nos. 2 and 2a). He watches athletes from all sports to learn what makes them successful. And his Doberman requires considerable attention.
A student of racing, Gibbs also makes frequent shop visits and spends countless hours on the simulator.
Still, from a distance it’d be easy to mistake Gibbs’ lifelong confidence for conceit or dismiss his accomplishments as solely a product of the resources of one of the best teams stock-car racing. To do so would be unfair.
“Very humble, very down-to-earth kid,” McFarland said. “He’s still young and yet he carries himself well, very well mannered. Just a pleasure to work with.
“He’s not a little snot-nosed kid that you think he should be.”
Gibbs is aware of detractors. To some degree they provide motivation, as if he needed any more of that.
“To be the best or to want to be the best, you’re going to know you can’t please everybody, and that’s something in life, too, that everybody’s got to learn,” Gibbs said.
“If I really wanted to describe myself, I’d want that person to show up and work with me during the whole week and see what I do. But you’re not going to have any of those because they’re not that dedicated.
“You’ve just got to do your own thing. Hammer down.”