All I’m Saying Is That Ty Gibbs Has Looked a Lot More Consistent Since Gabehart Left

I originally said this mostly as ragebait for the highly vocal anti-Gibbs crowd, in addition to poking fun at Joe Gibbs' lawsuit against Chris Gabehart, but after Ty's win at Bristol, I had to wonder if there might actually be something to it. So, let's take a quick look at some numbers to see what kind of a story we have here.

Finishing position doesn't tell the entire story, but gathering data about average running position is more work than I think this experiment deserves, so cut me some slack here. I also don't claim to be a statistician, so I'm just using methodology that makes sense to me to get an idea of Ty's performance over his career. Take everything I say here with a grain of salt.

With all that said, I'll be looking at average finishing position and median finishing position to get an idea of how well Ty ran overall in each season he's participated in full-time. I'll also be looking at standard deviation and median absolute deviation to see how much his finishing positions fluctuate over the course of a season. Since we're only eight races into the season, I'll be calculating these stats over the first eight races of each respective season in addition to the full season. I'll also take a look at the last eight races of 2025 to get a snapshot of his performance at the end of the Gabehart era.

So, without any further ado, let's take a look at some numbers.

Full-Season Stats

To start, let's look at numbers across the full NASCAR season. While Ty did do some part-time driving in 2022, his first full-time season was 2023, so we'll start with that all the way through the start of the 2026 season.

Full-Season Stats	2023	2024	2025	2026
Average	18.4	17.4	17.9	10.5
Median	17	16.5	17.5	4.5
Standard Deviation	9.7	11	9.8	11.8
Median Absolute Deviation	8	8	7.5	1

There are a few extra data points of interest that these numbers don't show. First, during Ty's sophomore season, he picked up two pole positions and had the best average starting position of his career at 11.4. Second is the slump of five straight finishes of 30th or worse at the end of 2024, culminating in a first-lap crash at Phoenix that year. That race was 20 days before Gabehart took over as competition director for JGR.

Interestingly, Ty actually seems to be more consistent during the 2025 campaign compared to his 2024 playoff run. Unfortunately, it's consistently worse in average and median finishing position. He did still have some good runs, but overall the data seems to support that 2025 was a slump for Ty.

First Eight Race Stats

Of course, the 2026 numbers are skewed since we have far fewer data points to work with. To help solve that, let's compare the first eight races of Ty's previous seasons in the same way to have a more level playing field.

First 8 Races	2023	2024	2025	2026
Average	16	10.3	22	10.5
Median	13	9.5	23.5	4.5
Standard Deviation	7.4	6	8.3	11.8
Median Absolute Deviation	4	6.5	8	1

Depending on which data point you use, Ty's 2024 season was either more or less consistent than the 2023 season. Either way, it's clear that the 2025 season still had some hangover from the rough finish to 2024, as the finishes are much worse and the consistency is overall lower.

Notably, the average and standard deviation for 2026 are skewed by the fact that the first two races of the season are superspeedways. This year, Ty ended up in crashes in both of those races, bringing the averages up. You can see from the median and MAD that his actual pace is much better than he's shown in any previous season.

End of the Gabehart Era

Finally, just for fun, let's run a comparison of the last eight races of 2025 and the first eight of 2026 to try comparing the transition directly.

Last 8 vs First 8	2024	2025
Average	19	10.5
Median	16.5	4.5
Standard Deviation	10.9	11.8
Median Absolute Deviation	7.5	1

To be honest, I'm not sure this comparison actually means anything, but it is interesting to see how big of a change Ty has managed to make over the off-season.

Conclusion

So, what does any of this actually mean?

Well, remember that Ty's 2025 slump actually started in 2024 while Gabehart was still the crew chief for Denny Hamlin. With that in mind, it makes it seem even more implausible that there's any correlation between Gabehart moving to Spire and Ty's sudden improvements. What we can tell for sure is that something has changed with the 54 team, and he's looking stronger now than he has at any point in his career.

Gabehart has said as part of the lawsuit that he was dissatisfied with Joe moving assets to put the primary focus on Ty's car, and people have used that as an excuse to dunk on Ty as a talentless NASCAR bust. The thing is, Ty won on debut in what was then the Xfinity Series and won a championship in his rookie season there. He's had plenty of strong runs and second-place finishes, and now he's a Cup Series winner on speed.

None of those things happen accidentally. You can dump as much money as you want into a car, but it's not going to luck into a win if the driver doesn't have some base of talent to work with. I don't think Ty is the fastest guy in the field, but he's clearly a talented young driver with a bright future ahead of him. It just remains to be seen how much further he can go.

And if he can get any better at giving interviews that don't make you want to throw something through your TV.

Disclosures

Stats were all taken from Racing Reference. Various online calculators were used for the calculations. I used CalculatorSoup for average and median, Calculator.net for standard deviation, and Statistics Kingdom for median absolute deviation. All data is rounded to one decimal point.