NASCAR driver with no wins in top equipment thinks he's Kyle Busch

After racing teammate Denny Hamlin hard lap after lap in Sunday's NASCAR Cup Series playoff race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, Ty Gibbs finally used up all his goodwill with the driver of the No. 11 Toyota and got spun around by the veteran, ending his day.

Hamlin and teammate Christopher Bell were both unable to get around Gibbs, and while teammates racing each other hard is nothing new, there are a few things to consider here.

First and foremost, Gibbs just completed his third straight winless regular season behind the wheel of the No. 54 Toyota, and he failed to make the playoffs for the second time, while Hamlin and Bell have won a combined nine races this year and are still competing for a championship.

We get it. The NASCAR playoffs are designed so that the playoff drivers and the non-playoff drivers are all on the track at the same time, and nobody is obligated to move over for anybody else. It's unlike any other sport.

But second, this sort of drama is not something you see at other teams. Take Hendrick Motorsports, for instance; is Alex Bowman giving any of his teammates problems for no reason now that he's out of the playoffs? No, and quite frankly, the idea is laughable.

And perhaps most importantly, there were definitely moves from Gibbs that were quite egregious, especially from a driver who is the only one on the team not competing for a championship for the second time in three years.

Hamlin getting fed up was fully justified if you watch all the cameras leading up to the contact.

Gibbs saying "game on" on the radio was particularly telling.

Ty Gibbs does his best Kyle Busch impression

Naturally, Gibbs was asked about it afterward. He completely ignored every question, and he did his best to imitate the driver he replaced at Joe Gibbs Racing two years ago by repeatedly saying he is looking forward to competing at Kansas Speedway this coming weekend.

On one hand, I get that too. The media have a way of spinning things. They literally get paid to spin things and to harp on one-liners. So if you can't say anything nice, don't say it at all. Don't fuel the fire.

But they also say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and it seemed like Ty Gibbs was trying too hard to be Kyle Busch here – as opposed to actually saying nothing at all.

Busch, of course, deflected all questions about his post-race altercation with Joey Logano at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in March 2017 and discussed how he was looking forward to competing at Phoenix Raceway. At the time, it was compared to Marshawn Lynch's famous "I'm just here so I don't get fined" Super Bowl presser.

But Busch had 38 career wins and a championship to his name at the time, and unlike Gibbs, his run-in wasn't with a teammate, and both drivers were actually competing for something in the closing laps of a race. Busch, one of the most polarizing drivers in the sport, was known for this sort of an attitude. This was vintage Kyle Busch.

Gibbs has zero career wins since replacing Busch and was quite literally being a roadblock for two teammates who are actually in championship contention, demonstrating a total lack of situational awareness and consideration for the organization owned by his own grandfather.

There is a difference.

When it comes to a non-playoff teammate purposely making life difficult on not just one but two (don't forget the fact that Bell was also impacted; he just didn't spin Gibbs like Hamlin did) title contenders, surely there are ways of avoiding this kind of intrateam drama that is completely unnecessary and ultimately serves no greater purpose.

Denny Hamlin generates criticism (for being Denny Hamlin)

Let's address the elephant in the room, however: had it been anybody other than Hamlin, we all know the move would've suddenly been okay.

Everyone would've hopped on the "silver spoon kid" train to criticize Ty Gibbs, references would have been made about how his disdain for Corey Heim is what is keeping NASCAR's up-and-coming sensation from eventually replacing Hamlin, you name it. The driver who spun Gibbs (or really anybody) would have been praised to no end.

We've all seen it, and we've all seen it time and time again. The "what" of the issues themselves is suddenly irrelevant; the "who" is how NASCAR fans determine whose side to take.

So because it was Hamlin, fans are naturally trying to justify Gibbs' approach to getting in the way and hindering his championship contending teammates, all of whom have actually won races since the end of August.

Maybe Hamlin adjusted his "I beat your favorite driver!" line to "I wrecked your favorite driver!" for this particular discussion with Coach Gibbs. That would have been epic. Gibbs later said that he's leaving it up to the drivers, so who knows?

At the moment, Ty's greatest NASCAR Cup Series achievement is winning NASCAR's corny in-season tournament gimmick with a 21st place finish over (checks notes) Ty Dillon at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. I can't think of any other sport that awards a nicer participation trophy.

I believed in Ty Gibbs. In his first full Xfinity Series season, he won the 2022 championship in dominant fashion, and I compared his early-Cup career win drought to that of Chase Elliott, another former Xfinity champion who ended up being the only driver to win multiple races each year from 2018 to 2022, winning the 2020 title along the way, after finally getting the monkey off of his back in the middle of year number three at a time when fans questioned his own ability to compete for a top-tier team in Hendrick Motorsports.

But Gibbs has stagnated, and now that stagnation has caused a level of drama within the team that isn't helping anybody. That's not on Hamlin.

Has that tournament trophy gotten to his head? For a driver with no wins in over 100 starts and who has consistently been the lowest performing JGR driver since his promotion in 2023, he is certainly trying to act a lot more like the multi-championship-winning driver he replaced than you'd expect.

Maybe he really is looking forward to racing at Kansas Speedway, where he finished fifth in September 2024. The Hollywood Casino 400 presented by ESPN BET is set to be shown live on USA Network from Kansas beginning at 3:00 p.m. ET on Sunday, September 28. Begin a free trial of FuboTV and don't miss it!