Joe Gibbs Racing’s Chris Gabehart chants 'let it grow' after talks of ‘revitalizing’ short tracks in NASCAR 

Joe Gibbs Racing's Director of Competition Chris Gabehart is excited about NASCAR investing more in short tracks, like many NASCAR drivers.

Sportsnaut's Matt Weaver asked the NASCAR Cup Series personality about the same after the 2025 season started with the Clash at Bowman Gray Stadium. The short track in Winston-Salem, North Carolina returned to the series after 53 years last Sunday and many shared their preference to revive others. Former crew chief Gabehart, who was split from Denny Hamlin at JGR last year, also reacted to a tweet by Weaver and wrote:

"Let it grow, let it grow, let it grow..."

Gabehart has long supported the idea of moving some Cup Series races to short tracks. In July last year, he shared that rotating Cup races between different short tracks could help keep them going for decades.

"I’ve been an advocate for years of investing naturally in our short tracks by moving a few Cup dates around every other year or so to the short tracks. South Boston is a prime market for that. I think you can inject a lot of natural capital into it because you bring Cup and TV money and everything with that to the facility, you force that facility to use X amount of money for capital upgrades, and that’s a natural renovation of sorts," Gabehart said (via sportsnaut.com).

The Cup Series last hosted a race at the 0.4-mile track in South Boston Speedway in 1971.

"Then we move on to the next town and that next track and these events will carry the short track community for the next 15 to 20 years. These are medium to long term investments and it’ll take years to see the benefit of that but we as an industry need to invest in the infrastructure to keep building our future," he added.

NASCAR also added the Rockingham Speedway to the Xfinity Series and Craftsman Truck Series circuits this year.

"Becomes much more difficult to handle" - Kevin Harvick reacted to Denny Hamlin losing Chris Gabehart as crew chief

Joe Gibbs Racing announced last November that Chris Gabehart would move to a new role as competition director and Chris Gayle will fill in for him as Denny Hamlin’s crew chief. Hamlin had won 22 races, including two Daytona 500s with Gabehart since 2019.

During the latest episode of the "Kevin Harvick Happy Hour" podcast, the former NASCAR driver commented on the change, saying:

"I think for Denny, now it becomes much more difficult to handle, in my opinion, because of the fact that he has a new crew chief on the Cup side...When you have a new crew chief, it requires more effort from the driver side of things, to get that relationship started...I don’t get the feeling that this was, this obviously wasn’t Denny’s choice.

Gabehart joined JGR in 2012 as a race engineer and worked as the crew chief in the Xfinity Series before working with Hamlin.