Stay tuned.
That’s the response from Chris Gabehart, the former crew chief for Denny Hamlin in the NASCAR Cup Series and competition director for Joe Gibbs Racing, after his former team filed a lawsuit yesterday accusing Gabehart of stealing confidential information and providing it to a rival Cup Series team.
Gabehart first began working for Joe Gibbs Racing as an engineer in 2012, before eventually working his way up to crew chief for Hamlin from 2019 to 2024.
This past season, Gabehart was promoted to Director of Competition for JGR, but he mysteriously departed in November with no announcement or official word about his future in the sport or which team he would be going to.
The complaint filed by Joe Gibbs Racing yesterday in the federal court for the Western District of North Carolina shed more light on what led to the separation between Gabehart and the team, alleging that Gabehart became unhappy with his position at JGR during the 2025 Cup Series season and asked the team for “complete responsibility and control” of all departments supporting their competition efforts.
In November, Gabehart allegedly requested a meeting with team owner Joe Gibbs, where he asked for what the team said amounted to “carte blanche authority over all racing decisions.”
Gibbs refused to give more authority to Gabehart, who decided at that point to leave the company. As part of his contract with the team, Gabehart signed a non-compete agreement that would prohibit him from working for another Cup Series team for a period of 9 months after the termination of his contract, but JGR says that they were prepared to offer Gabehart “a generous separation agreement” that would have permitted him to work for another team so long as he didn’t solicit JGR employees and agreed to return all confidential information.
JGR says they learned that Gabehart had been meeting with Jeff Dickerson, owner of Spire Motorsports, and became suspicious of Gabehart. As a result, the team began to conduct a forensic audit of Gabehart’s team-issued laptop:
“The results were shocking.”
JGR says that Gabehart had synced his team laptop to his personal Google Drive, and created a folder called “Spire” that contained a subfolder named “Past Setups.” He also reportedly had “more than a dozen photos” containing JGR confidential information and trade secrets, as well as 20 race car setup files.
Also among the files, the team says that Gabehart took photos on his cell phone of team payroll information, post-race audit and performance analysis of each JGR driver for the entire 2025 season, revenues from sponsorship, pit crew analytics, and more. They allege that he took photos of the documents in order to attempt to hide that he was moving files, and that the Spire folder on his drive contained files from his time at JGR.
The team says that after they discovered Gabehart had kept their confidential information, they agreed to a forensic review under the condition that Gabehart wouldn’t immediately go to another Cup Series team. Gabehart, who had allegedly accepted an offer from Spire to become their Chief Motorsports Officer, wouldn’t agree to the review, resulting in the lawsuit being filed by JGR.
The lawsuit asks for damages “in excess of” $8 million for misappropriation of trade secrets and unfair trade practices, as well as an injunction forcing Gabehart to return any confidential information to JGR and cease from providing any of their trade secrets to other teams.
But Gabehart, as expected, has a much different side of the story.
While he hasn’t yet filed a response in court, Gabehart posted a statement on social media strongly denying the allegations and blasting the lawsuit filed by his former employer:
“Yesterday afternoon, Joe Gibbs Racing filed a lawsuit claiming – falsely – that I shared JGR confidential information with Spire Motorsports and/or other unnamed third parties. I feel compelled to speak out today and forcefully and emphatically deny these frivolous and retaliatory claims.
I look forward to the opportunity to demonstrate to the Court that I have not shared JGR’s confidential information with anyone. In fact, I have already demonstrated that to JGR. A third-party forensic expert retained by JGR recently examined my laptop, cell phone and personal Google Drive and found no evidence to support the baseless allegations in JGR’s lawsuit. We even offered JGR the opportunity to do a similar review of Spire’s systems. JGR refused that offer and filed this spiteful lawsuit instead.
Stay tuned. We will have much more to say in the legal response we will be filing in the coming days.”
Gabehart is highly regarded as one of the best minds in the NASCAR Cup Series garage, and is widely credited with the success Denny Hamlin had during the years Gabehart served as his crew chief. There’s no doubt that pretty much any team in the garage area would have been willing to hire him after he left Joe Gibbs Racing, but now it will be interesting to see whether JGR tries to enforce the non-compete agreement in his contract to keep him from immediately joining Spire.
And as former NASCAR driver and spotter Brian Keselowski, who is also the brother of team owner and Cup Series champion Brad Keselowski, pointed out, this is only going to happen more and more with the Next Gen car, which forces teams to use the same supplier for their parts and standardizes the car among teams far more than it’s ever been:
Stay tuned…because I’m sure a lot of people in NASCAR will be closely watching how this lawsuit turns out.
