NASCAR is a sport that sees teams and drivers put out their best work in hopes of claiming victory. Like any sport, you need clarity, vision, management, and teamwork to excel but NASCAR is not just any other sport. Here, you’ve got the best of the best competing for the solitary pole position and it is an uphill climb for any team to reach the pinnacle. There have only been a fair few teams who stand out in NASCAR and Joe Gibbs Racing is surely one of those.

However, Joe Gibbs had little clue on how to run a successful NASCAR team or how to pick drivers and people to work together when he first entered in 1992. It was his late son J.D. Gibbs’ idea to make their race car team. So he and Joe Gibbs penned out a dream on the paper and started their journey. For a father-son duo hailing from North Carolina, this racing thing was new to them and they needed someone to partner their vision.

Here’s how Joe Gibbs kickstarted his NASCAR dream with outside help

For a team to enter NASCAR tracks, they needed to have sponsors and in hopes of making Joe Gibbs Racing a reality, they knocked on Norm Miller’s door. He was the chairman of the board at Interstate Batteries at the time. Joe Gibbs and his team certainly had no clue on how to go about racing in NASCAR but he somehow was able to convince Miller to sponsor his team. Soon, a plan written on a piece of paper came into motion.

Joe Gibbs while speaking on his Next Gen Pit Documentary, shared the unfiltered version of the story on how JGR took a shot at their dreams. “We put a dream on a piece of paper, showed up on Norm Miller’s doorsteps at Interstate Batteries. He said, ‘Who’s your driver?’ I said we don’t have one. ‘Where’s your race shop?’ I said we don’t have one. And I said Norm, this is a dream on a piece of paper and can you believe it he said, ‘Let’s do it.’”

While NASCAR was a new ball game altogether for Joe Gibbs and his team at the time, he viewed the sport from a footballing lens. Explaining the similarities between the two he said, “What I found out was everything in racing is just like football, the only difference is we have a car over here and sometimes it doesn’t behave. The two worlds that I have been in, both of them are team-oriented, it’s picking the right people and getting those people to work together and if you do that, they are going to make you look good.”

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Adapt and change is the name of the game in NASCAR and JGR sure did that. They added five Cup Series championships and 450 people working with them.

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The JGR bossman clearly knew how to handle a football team and the three Super Bowl wins back his coaching prowess. However, starting with a team of 17 members in 1992, not everything went their way. In fact, they were winless in their first season but this was not enough to sink Joe and his team as their relentless pursuit paid off with the dawn of the new century.

Explaining how his team has grown over the years, Joe Gibbs added, “Well, we got off to a rough start in our first year of racing. We didn’t win a race and you go, ‘Hey, is this too big for us?’ We started our first year with 17 people and I felt like maybe we can control this. Today we’re racing three different divisions, 450 people and it’s totally out of control.”

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It’s fair to say that ever since joining NASCAR, JGR has established itself as a powerhouse of the sport and nothing less than the title will be expected from the team come the 2024 Cup Series.