KANSAS CITY, Kan. -- Cooler heads have prevailed inside Joe Gibbs Racing following last week's run-in between teammates Denny Hamlin and Ty Gibbs, whom Hamlin wrecked when Gibbs wouldn't get out of his way at New Hampshire.
Hamlin is in the playoffs and racing for an elusive first Cup Series championship, while Gibbs, the grandson of team owner Joe Gibbs, is not eligible to race for the title. After the two had on-track contact, Hamlin asked on his team radio if the organization was too scared to give the 22-year-old team orders.
Hamlin said Saturday, a day before the middle race at Kansas Speedway in the round of 12, that all sides had an opportunity to speak their mind in this week's competition meeting. The three-time Daytona 500 champion declined to elaborate other than admitting that, by moving Gibbs out of his way, "I definitely got too hot under the collar, and it went too far on my end."
"There are things I should have done differently," he said.
JGR teammate Christopher Bell said the message was clear and didn't even need to be spoken as to how the Toyota drivers should be racing each other at this time of the year. There are six races remaining to crown the Cup champion.
"We shouldn't wreck each other. That was very clear and blatantly wrong and hopefully doesn't happen again," Bell said. "I think it already was clear to us before, and we just need to respect each other."
JGR driver Chase Briscoe, meanwhile, won his seventh pole of the year to lead the field to green Sunday at Kansas. He will start alongside Hamlin. Briscoe's seven poles are the most in a single season since Kyle Busch in 2017.
Briscoe and Hamlin will likely race clean at the start, which Hendrick Motorsports driver Kyle Larson, who has three of his four teammates still in the 12-driver field, believes is right. Gibbs was racing a title contender who happens to be his teammate far too hard at too early a point of last week's race.
"I think at the end -- if you're racing for a win, you're racing for a win," Larson said. "You're never going to give up a win in a Cup Series for a teammate. But I think if you're running midpack in a stage, yeah, that expectation should be followed."
Larson said the expectations of how Hendrick drivers should race each other is clearly defined and evidenced on track every week.
"I think you're always just looking out for what you can do to make things a little bit easier on your teammates," he said. "TV probably doesn't even see the teamwork that happens, but like last week, Alex [Bowman] cut me a lot of breaks at the end of the first stage. I passed him, and then I was starting to die.
"He could have easily passed me back but kind of just rode back there. So it's just little things like that where I think where Denny was probably expecting that, as every team who has multiple cars has had a conversation of those expectations. So I could see Denny's frustration, for sure. I'm sure they had a lot of talks this week, so I would expect it to be much better."