INDIANAPOLIS — Joe Gibbs probably won’t field a fourth team next season because he’s running out of time to put a proper expansion package together.
“You wouldn’t say never, but it doesn’t look right now that it will happen for us next year,” Gibbs told The Associated Press before the start of Sunday’s race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Gibbs has been intent on pushing his program to four teams, but doesn’t want to rush into it and said he’s closing in on a deadline that would make 2009 impossible.
“I think we want to be real cautious, we always have been, we’ve gone slow and I think everything has to be in place,” he said. “I’d say right now everything is not in place. You’ve got to have the right driver, the right sponsor and I’d say we’re pretty close to not being able to do that in time for next year.”
That would seemingly indicate that 18-year-old phenom Joey Logano will indeed be promoted to replace Tony Stewart in the No. 20 Toyota.
Stewart is leaving Joe Gibbs Racing at the end of the season, and team officials are very high on Logano and have not said anything that would infer Logano won’t be in the ride.
There had been some speculation that Ryan Newman, who announced last week he’s leaving Penske Racing, was in talks with Gibbs. But if there’s no fourth team, there doesn’t seem to be room for Newman or any other free agent.
Gibbs was deliberate when the organization went from one car to two, properly putting Tony Stewart’s team together so that he was competing for wins immediately. But the expansion to three teams was not as smooth, as the No. 11 entry struggled through its 2005 debut season.
Jason Leffler ran 19 races before he was replaced by a combination of Denny Hamlin and J.J. Yeley. Hamlin took the ride over for good at the start of the 2006 season, won two races and made the Chase for the championship.
“We definitely do not want to rush it,” Gibbs said. “The startup things, it’s hard to get something off and running with that many people. Used to be, the first year we had 17 people and that’s what you needed to start a race team. Now it’s more like 70, it’s a lot to get done and a lot to get done the right way.
“We did learn lessons from what we did before, and it’s always good not to underestimate and think ‘we did this, it won’t be that hard’ because it is very, very hard.”
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