In 2024, when JGR announced that Denny Hamlin would pair with Chris Gayle instead of his six-season crew chief, Chris Gabehart, the driver was shocked to say the least. After all, with Gabehart, his success had imploded. But as Gayle and Hamlin began working, they realized they didn’t need a new foundation to build their relationship on. All they needed was what Gabehart had already set up. However, Kevin Harvick firmly believes that Hamlin is much better off now.
“I think the 11 team is better than they were when Gabehart was there. They’re better now than they were three years ago, two years ago which is saying something,” Harvick said on his Happy Hour podcast this week.
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Interestingly, this reality check only rubbed salt into Gabehart’s wounds because the driver Gabehart used to work with is putting together the best stretch of racing of his career without him.
The numbers back Harvick up entirely.
Before Gabehart joined as crew chief in 2019, Hamlin averaged about 2.2 wins per season in 14 years; with Gabehart on the box, that went up to 3.8 per year. After Gabehart left the crew chief role in 2025, Denny Hamlin earned 6 wins with Gayle. He has already won three this season.
In the first 10 races of 2026, he became the first driver in NASCAR history to lead over 600 laps in the opening stretch of a season using the Next-Gen car. He won at Nashville and Michigan back-to-back. The Michigan win, his 63rd career Cup victory, tied Kyle Busch for ninth on the all-time wins list. And the connection he shares with Gayle comes so organically that it speaks for itself.
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Why it matters is because Gabehart was known to be one of the best crew chiefs in the sport. He pulled Denny Hamlin out of a 47-race winless streak in 2018 to begin the 2019 season with his second Daytona 500 win and turned him into a frontrunner. But for Harvick, it is much more than just a new crew chief. It is also about the chemistry they share.
Hamlin is 45 years old now. Yet, he still has the motivation to continue his winning ways, rather than someone like Martin Truex Jr., who walked away because the motivation wasn’t there anymore. It’s also about clicking with the right team.
“When you get motivated and can keep yourself motivated, you have so much more experience. I used to tell Danica Patrick this all the time.
“When you get into that chemistry and all the things that happen where everything just works, you don’t want to lose that because you don’t get it very often in your career.”
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And seeing from Gayle’s remarks from last year, they certainly have come far.
“Do I feel like myself and Denny have even come close to reaching the peak of the relationship? No,” Gayle told NBC Sports at Atlanta in 2025. “I feel like there’s some me still growing into that position.
“I think that Denny has done a great job of fully trusting me to ‘(his) role is driving the car and (my) role is handling whatever happens to the car.”
None of that is a comfortable context for Gabehart right now.
The tense situation between JGR and Gabehart
JGR claims he photographed proprietary files on his company laptop, synced data to a personal Google Drive folder he named, not subtly, “Spire,” with a subfolder called “setups” before leaving the team. They also claim that he told JGR executives he had not spoken to anyone at Spire about a job. However, later, Spire announced him as their Chief Motorsports Officer.
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The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Charlotte, seeks over $8 million and has since been expanded to include Spire as a co-defendant. JGR argues that Spire’s improved on-track results are a direct product of what Gabehart brought with him.
At Bristol in April, JGR sent their own social media manager, the guy who runs Ty Gibbs’ accounts, to photograph Gabehart standing at Spire’s pit station during Cup practice, wearing a headset. They filed the photos as evidence of a restraining order violation. Gabehart’s lawyers called it stalking. The judge extended the TRO but declined to ban him from attending races.
Gabehart’s position is that the lawsuit is pure retaliation for leaving. He says an independent forensic audit found zero evidence that any data was ever transmitted to Spire. He also says his role at JGR became impossible to do properly, partly because of internal pressure.
This Sunday at Pocono, Hamlin goes for three straight wins. He has won there seven times, more than any other active driver. He enters as the championship favorite at +225, having leapfrogged Tyler Reddick in the betting markets after the back-to-back wins.
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