It's hard to think of him primarily as a football coach any more.
Joe Gibbs may have three Super Bowl rings, but he's also won a trio of NASCAR Cup titles. And now the team he literally built from the ground up is celebrating its 20th anniversary in NASCAR.
It's a stretch that started with Jimmy Makar as a crew chief and a bare-bones staff who didn't even have a building to call home. It's one that continues into 2011 with a pair of championship favorites in-house and titles in 2000 (Bobby Labonte), 2002 (Tony Stewart) and 2005 (Stewart).
He's made 1,298 Cup starts, earning 88 victories. He has 598 top-10 finishes, 366 of them top fives.
As the team prepares to move forward, it took some time Thursday to celebrate its past. Gibbs offered charming and often hilarious anecdotes of both his tenure as a team owner and the men who he's worked with in that role.
At the time, known for his role with the Washington Redskins, Gibbs decided to move into NASCAR and was ready for his debut at Daytona International Speedway in 1992.
At the track, he soon discovered just how little he knew.
“I'll tell you what a novice I was,” he said Thursday at Joe Gibbs Racing. “I got down there and I was talking to Jimmy Makar and it was the qualifying race and Jimmy was sweating walking back and forth and I was kind of going, why is he so upset? … He goes, 'If we don’t make this thing, we're not racing.' I went, ‘What?' I had no clue. Really what happened to that, we tear up our car, which was a pretty good car, we go to the backup, Dale Jarrett, we start that race and all the sudden we go from the back to the front.
“My wife is up there, it's our very first race. And Pat, Pat's pretty tight with a buck. So, she has some money in that race car and she's watching that thing … We're all going, 'This is a piece of cake. We're going to win every race.' About halfway through that thing, they went three abreast on the backstretch. They tore our car, Dale got hit about five times.”
Gibbs was dealing with his onslaught of emotions when he headed over with Norm Miller, who represented sponsor Interstate Batteries, to look over the car.
“We get back there and everybody's got wreckers and everything in the back and, of course, I'm totally depressed,” Gibbs said. “I get back there with Norm. Norm's looking around, they got TV cameras all over the place, our car is tore all up, Dale's getting out of the car, he's wobbling. And Norm's taking the whole thing. He's looking around, and he goes, 'Hey, this isn't so bad. Listen, if we're not running good, the best thing to do is wreck. We're getting a lot of attention here.'”
He went on to sign some of the most talented, and sometimes volatile, drivers in the business.
Asked about whether it was his football players or NASCAR drivers who were toughest to manage, Gibbs laughed.
"Are you kidding? That's easy isn't it,” he said. “Both of them are up here.”
After all, Gibbs has endured some tense moments with both Stewart and Kyle Busch for their on and off-track comments and antics. Yet, he knows talent when he sees it and has always been able to inspire his athletes to give their all, no matter what is going on around them.
Thursday, as he and some of those drivers recounted tales of his NASCAR tenure, it was easy to see the respect Gibbs both carries for those around him and that he has earned from those who work for and with him.
These days, he's one of the premier owners in the sport. He has an uncanny ability to match drivers with the crew chiefs who can bring out their best, to mix and match personalities together in a way that makes a career step up a notch.
Now, he and his team are hoping to go yet another step — to the 2011 championship.
To many, Hamlin is the man to watch when it comes to challenging Jimmie Johnson in his quest for a sixth consecutive title. But it would be dangerous to overlook Busch. He's fierce and fiery on the track, the kind of driver both capable of ripping off a series of victories while maturing into someone capable of recognizing when a top-10 day has to be enough.
What have they learned in the offseason that will help them gain that little bit of needed ground to go from last season's runner-up to this year's winner?
“I think as a race team we're wiser,” Makar, now senior vice president of racing operations, said. “… Old saying: you've got to lose one to win one as far as the championship goes. I think we're going to be much more wise when it comes to how to approach the championship and complete it and win it for sure. This winter we spent a lot of time, and we all do, we really had to focus on the fact that we couldn't sit on what we were in any category. We had to look at things to improve and work really hard on improving everything and not rest on where we were last year.
“Felt like we were in a great place with our cars and competitiveness last year at the end of the season and through the Chase. We had fast cars, they led laps and did most of the things that we needed to, but everybody else went to work this winter, too, so we really focused on coming out of the box with the cars a little better than we had last year. I think that's the biggest thing that we did.”
