Chris Gabehart has had a lot of success as the crew chief for Denny Hamlin‘s No. 11 car over the last five years. On Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour podcast, Gabehart spoke to Kevin Harvick about his journey to NASCAR after being a race car driver.
Gabehart revealed that he’s a “third-generation racer on one side” and his grandfather competed in NASCAR. He grew up just a few minutes away from Louisville Motor Speedway and began competing in go-kart racing at 10. Gabehart revealed that he competed in go-kart racing for 10 years before competing in pavement midget racing.
During that time, Gabehart was attendingPurdue University with the “intent of strengthening my racing background.” Gabehart added, “I knew that I wanted to do, I wanted to race, whether it be driving or working on them. The hope was driving them.”
Gabehart began racing pavement late models throughout the Midwest during his time in college. He then began to realize that he needed to start making money, and driving might not be the way to go, which led to him transitioning to the “entrepreneurial side” of racing. He said that winning a championship in 2007 helped him realize that he needed to stop racing full-time and move forward to the entrepreneurial side of the sport.
How Kyle Busch helped Chris Gabehart to become a top crew chief
But how did Gabehart get into NASCAR? “It was late model racing,” he said. “Tom Busch was running Kyle Busch‘s late model program around the country. Kyle would drive a little bit. They would have some other mainstay drivers that would also drive. But Tom took note of kind of the little team that could with our 28-foot tag along. There’s this guy over in the tire impound doing all of his tires. There’s this guy that jumps out of the car and changes all his shocks and springs or goes up in the trailer and rebuilds a shock and gets back out and then he can actually get in the car and go pretty fast too.
“…Kind of transitioning from driving to working on them, I went crew chief for a team one year in Atlanta in 2009. Still own my own car at that point and raced it when I could. But as I look back in a rears, I didn’t know this at the time, but I was building a relationship with Tom and Tom had taken an interest in me.”
Gabehart then said he was asked to be the crew chief for their late model team, at KBM (Kyle Busch Motorsports), which led to him moving up in the ranks to where he is today. “I’m so thankful to this day for everything that Kyle Busch and Tom did for me in those years because it worked out exactly like I hoped,” Gabehart said.
“They took an interest in my abilities and thought a lot of my work ethic I guess or just wanted to get me out of there, one of the two. Dave Rogers at Joe Gibbs Racing was looking for an engineer at the start of 2012 and I became the candidate for that. That’s how I got to JGR and the rest is history.”
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