Ty Gibbs’ Playoff Hopes Collapse After Disastrous Richmond Outing

It turned into a Chevrolet showcase at Richmond, with Austin Dillon taking the checkered flag and Alex Bowman trailing him by 2.471 seconds in second place. For Toyota, though, the night unraveled into a nightmare on a track where the Camry usually shines.

Only one Toyota cracked the top-10, hampered largely by pit road missteps. Denny Hamlin salvaged 10th despite slow stops, while Christopher Bell’s race ended in P21 with two costly pit road errors.

The setbacks didn’t shake their standings much but Ty Gibbs, locked in a must-win playoff scenario with his No. 54 Toyota, saw his hopes collapse almost immediately. He picked up a speeding penalty on lap 37 during his first stop, then compounded the damage by breaking pit road speed again on lap 74.

The double penalties, combined with late-race brake troubles, left Gibbs limping home in P18. His playoff hopes now hang entirely on Daytona next Saturday, where only a victory will punch his ticket.

Gibbs’s race strategist, Chris Gabehart, broke down the brake fiasco afterward, explaining, “There was a really bad TV show. There’s a really bad fire in the left front firewall area, kind of ultimately a bunch of rubber gets piled in there on these cars and has no place to escape because of the underbodies and so forth.

“And all the tire wear that we have at this track, a lot of rubber clumps all over the track. And eventually, the whole firewall is caked in rubber. So, I think we were one of a couple cars that had some fires… I think it boiled all the fluid in there. I think it burned the clutch line out altogether. So the clutch didn’t work and then boiled all the fluid in the reservoir and caused much air in the brake system.

“And then you’ve got to kind of halfway try to bleed them throughout 30 or 40 laps there, and then finally the brakes came back enough to work. So that’s my guess without us getting back and looking at it. But it’s a lot to diagnose in the moment. That’s for sure.”