Gibbs faces consequences for wrecking way into title race

PHOENIX (AP) — Ty Gibbs knew his teammate had to win the final regular-season race to qualify for the Xfinity Series championship.

And yet Gibbs still spun Brandon Jones out of the lead on the final lap last week at Martinsville Speedway as Gibbs picked up his sixth win of the season.

Had he just settled for second place, Gibbs and Jones would have both advanced to Saturday’s title race to give Joe Gibbs Racing a pair of Toyotas in the winner-take-all four-driver championship finale at Phoenix Raceway.

So why did he do it?

“It comes down to just caught in the moment, and you know, selfish actions led to that,” Gibbs said Thursday at the Phoenix Convention Center.

The 20-year-old Gibbs — whose grandfather, Joe Gibbs, is a Hall of Famer in both NASCAR and the NFL and the owner of one of NASCAR’s top organizations — has had a miserable week in preparation of racing for his first national championship. He created it himself by preventing Jones from winning at Martinsville, where the crowd chanted “Thank You, Grandpa” as Gibbs celebrated the win.

Then after the race, Gibbs in an interview compared himself to Jesus when asked about being NASCAR’s newest villain. “I always go back to the same verse, that Jesus was hated first and among all the people.”

Gibbs said Thursday he regrets the comment and said he didn’t deliver the line the way he intended. But he regrets just about everything from last Saturday and has been on an apology tour at JGR, with Jones and with Toyota, which is furious one of its cars was knocked from the championship.

Because of Gibbs’ action, the title race comes down to one Toyota driver and three Chevrolets from the JR Motorsports trio of Noah Gragson, Josh Berry and Justin Allgaier. Drivers from every series — including Gibbs’ veteran teammates at JGR — have criticized Gibbs for Martinsville and his rivals are piling on headed into the finale.

“He doesn’t care. He lives in fantasyland,” Gragson said Thursday. “I have no clue honestly what goes through his mind. It’s got to be badass to live in the kind of world where you just have no real consequences or anything.”

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His grandfather, however, insisted this week there would be consequences for his grandson. Ty Gibbs said Thursday he doesn’t know what they will be, but will accept any punishment headed his way.

He’s expected to be named the replacement for Kyle Busch in the No. 18 Toyota in the Cup Series — one of the top rides in NASCAR — and Gibbs doesn’t know if Martinsville has changed that.

“When tough things happen, and certainly nobody wanted that to happen, I said, ‘Now there’s consequences,’ and so we’re trying to walk through those with him,” Joe Gibbs said. “Ty is walking through it, I’m walking through it, and we’re still in that process. It was something that was heat of the battle. Everything is taking place. There was so much going on.”

Complicating the situation is that Jones is leaving JGR…