Coy Gibbs Opens Up

Below is an excerpt from Steve Matthes' interview with JGR Toyota Yamaha's Coy Gibbs. To read the interview in its entirety click HERE.

Weigandt and I were talking in our podcast. You guys started off slow. Hansen and Summey and you wanted to build a program and it’s no secret that you guys have a terrific…
Let me say this: it took us ten years to win a NASCAR Cup championship. And some people are going to bag on us on the way up, on the way down, whichever direction we’re going, but it took ten years on our car side to win a championship. That’s ten years. That’s a long time. So we’re building. We’ve built a foundation. A lot of people, even people that work for me, they’re not going to be here. They aren’t going to put up with it. They’re not going to do all the hard work to when you get to your goal. But the people that stay here and keep digging, when it does happen, that’s really why you do this. It’s easy to jump around and go from here to there and get on with a rider that can win a championship, but we’re going to sit here and keep building it until we make it.

That was my question. So you’re not frustrated.
Obviously we’re competitive. We don’t want to run bad. So yeah, it is frustrating, but that’s the part that drives you and makes you keep going.

We were talking about you went out there and spent big money on Stewart and you’ve tried going smaller, now you’re recycling riders, which is sort of unheard of. And it hasn’t worked out to be a title.
I think there definitely is frustration. Any time you’re in a competition and you’re not winning, then you’re frustrated. So yeah, it’s been five years of a lot of hard work. Definitely some frustration. We’ve had some good moments. But it takes a long time to win in motor sports. You’re not going to come here and battle with Factory Honda year one and go win something. I think that’s a pipe dream. So I think there’s always been a long-term plan. And we’ll just keep digging along. The hardest part is making financial sense of paying someone a ton of money. It doesn’t financially work out. It’s difficult to play that game and to plug in the pieces when a lot of times you can’t afford them.