Chris Gabehart was the former crew chief for Denny Hamlin and the No. 11 team at Joe Gibbs Racing. Ahead of the 2025 season, he was promoted to competition director for the team.
A report in December stated that Gabehart was heading to Spire Motorsports. However, there still has been no official announcement of that move.
Joe Gibbs Racing has now opened a lawsuit in the Western District of North Carolina against Gabehart.
JGR is accusing Gabehart of stealing confidential team information. They say this came before departing the organization and accepting a leadership role with Spire Motorsports.
The team claims that before his November 2025 exit from JGR, Gabehart photographed sensitive data from his JGR owned laptop. They also claim he synced files to a personal Google Drive folder which had the “Spire” label.
They also claim he kept race setup documents, sim data, analytics, payroll data, driver compensation figures and sponsorship revenue information.
The team is claiming this information was collected before Gabehart was given an offer to work for Spire Motorsports.
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Per court documents, “Until November 10, 2025, Defendant served as one of JGR’s most senior leaders with respect to all competitive aspects of the business. After his demands for additional authority were rebuffed by JGR’s owner, Defendant immediately embarked on a brazen scheme to steal JGR’s most sensitive information and use it for the benefit of a direct competitor in NASCAR—Spire Motorsports.”
“JGR’s exceptional results are the result of decades of technical and process driven research, refinement, and innovation among other things. JGR’s analyses, processes, and strategies are highly specialized and technically complex.”
“Possession of this information would enable competitors to improve their race teams and equipment in ways they could not achieve through independent development, thereby allowing them to unfairly compete with JGR by bypassing or accelerating the research and development process and negating the expertise JGR has built over decades of success.”
“Because all teams now race the same car and obtain car components from the same suppliers, understanding only a small portion of the details of how a competitor sets up its cars would allow other teams to extrapolate on that information and recreate a successful car setup.”
“Defendant was restricted from access to JGR’s Confidential Information and Trade Secrets that did not relate to his job duties, including, but not limited to, information about JGR’s drivers, sponsor, business partners, and payroll unrelated to competitive activities.”
Gabehart began working for JGR in 2012. He started as an engineer, to crew chief, and eventually to Competition Director.
JGR is seeking for the Confidential Information and Trade Secrets to be withheld. Additionally, they are asking for damages of $8M.
The 2026 NASCAR season has just begun. The famed Daytona 500 took place on Sunday.
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Spire Motorsports | Joe Gibbs Racing | NASCAR
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