Gibbs team isn't rushing expansion
Sunday, Jun. 21, 2009
Joe Gibbs Racing will take the summer to decide if the organization can expand to four teams in 2010.
"We can still plug in a fourth team," team president J.D. Gibbs said. "We're in no hurry. If we have to wait a year, that's fine. You have got to have the right driver, the right core group and the right sponsor. But if that happened, we could do it pretty quick.
"I wouldn't cross it off for next year, but at the same time we're not going to force it."
JGR has been deliberate in its previous expansions and nixed adding a fourth car last year after Tony Stewart left the race team. For now, a bigger priority is figuring out how to get its three current teams running consistently.
Gibbs praised rookie Joey Logano for weathering a tough start to the season, then improving steadily over the last six weeks. But a team meeting held earlier this week with Kyle Busch, the crew chiefs and engineers was called to help the organization understand why its cars aren't performing at the same pace they were last season.
Although Busch has three Cup wins, he's ninth in the Sprint Cup Series standings and has just a 53-point cushion over 13th-place David Reutimann. Denny Hamlin is 10th in the standings, 11 points behind Busch.
"We've just got to do a better job finishing," Gibbs said. "If we finished where we were running in a lot of the races and capitalize on some of the wins we could have gotten, we would be in pretty good shape.
"We're not in horrible shape. The other thing is we have to consistently make gains in the garage to keep up with the other guys."
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