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NASCAR MEDIA CONFERENCE

November 14, 2018

Tony Gibson

THE MODERATOR: We will be joined by Tony Gibson, the crew chief of the No.4 Jimmy John's Ford. Can you talk about how it felt in Phoenix getting back on the pit box for Kevin and how you're feeling heading into Homestead?
TONY GIBSON: Well, it was obviously a little nerve‑racking. For me it was about what not to make a mistake at and screw up a good lesson plan that Rodney had laid out. That part of it was really nerve‑racking. The first part of the weekend went extremely well, tons of speed and things were going smooth, and then lap 73 it kind of went all to heck there.
So yeah, I was just real nervous. After I got into the race a little bit and got over the flat tire and got into the groove of things, it went a little bit easier. But still, the pressure of just not making the right call or just putting ourselves in a bad position was my biggest worry. Fortunately for us it all worked out at the end, but it was pretty stressful.

Q. I know that this has been quite a year for you, and I know you tweeted this summer about how July 6th was when you had the blood clot in your brain and came back to work on August 20th, and I wanted to ask you, how long were you hospitalized in that time, and how was that situation detected? Was that just a doctor's visit? Was it something that suddenly happened and you or your wife took you to the emergency room or something? Can you kind of talk me through that, please?
TONY GIBSON: Yeah, I was actually just driving home from work and just had a real‑‑ I just could not get my brain to function with my hands and my feet, and I could not drive any further and knew something was wrong. Just wasn't sure, and ended up going to the emergency room and put me in for observation that night, and then about 1:00 in the morning they came back and they had done several scans and told me I had a blood clot in my vertebral artery, so that started the whole process.
I was in the hospital for about a week, a little over a week. The blood clot started to dissolve. I was home one day and back in the hospital again. As the blood clot started to dissolve, it caused a mini‑stroke in my optical nerve system in my left side, which caused me to lose 85 percent of my hearing in my left ear, and I lost most of the function of my left eye, so I was in and out of the hospital for about three weeks. I'd be home for a day, back in for four days, and it was quite a deal. I was in Wake Forest for a while doing therapy to get everything back working right, and I still go back. Actually I have a neurologist's appointment on Friday in Wake Forest, but I'm unfortunately not going to be able to make that one. I'm going to be at Homestead. But I have doctor's visits quite a bit that I still have to go back and check, and they check the‑‑ and I'm on a lot of medicine, obviously, for blood thinners and blood clots and things like that that I have to take every day twice a day.
But I'm managing it. You know, it's just part of life and things that‑‑ I was very lucky, and I don't take that for granted. There's a lot of people out there that are way worse than me, so it's just something that I'll overcome and I'll get used to it and go on.

Q. So when the team asked you to take over for Rodney at the track for two weeks, because of your health condition, even though you're better now, was there a consideration to say no and feel like it was going to be too much on you, or how did you decide that you could do this or handle this when they came and asked you about that?
TONY GIBSON: Well, I wasn't 100 percent sure. I told Rodney and Zipadelli that I had to call my doctors and make sure that I could fly, first of all, that it was safe for me to fly. So I did that and contacted my doctors, and they all released me to go and fly. They said I'm probably safer than anybody on the plane as far as blood clots with the medicines that I'm on.
Other than having to get up and walk around on the plane and do my normal stuff that I do, they were pretty satisfied with me doing it, and if all possible, I was going. There was no way I was going to let those guys down. So as long as my doctor said I could go, I was going. There's just no doubt about it. That's what they got me here to do, and I just feel like it's part of my job, whether it's helping all four cars every day of the week while I'm in the shop or if one needs me on the road. I went earlier in the year to Bristol when Klausmeier was having his second child and filled in there.
That's what I'm here to do. That was part of my agreement with the company, and I would do it for any of these guys.

Q. I wanted to ask you what you kind of see as your biggest challenge heading into the weekend being put in this situation. You couldn't be put into a higher stakes situation.
TONY GIBSON: Yeah, it was a pretty nerve‑racking deal there for sure. My biggest deal, like I said before, is just making sure that we take each practice‑‑ the inspection process we all know is pretty intense, so making sure that stuff flows good and we get through there safe and sound, and then we'll take each practice just like we did Phoenix. We took each practice, each run one at a time, thought about changes and what we needed to do, and like I said, Rodney had a great plan laid out, and we kind of just followed his lead through that. He has an awesome race team. They all pretty much know what to do. You don't have to tell them what to do. They follow right along.
We had to adapt a few times off the lesson plan, but like I said, it all went really smooth. But my biggest deal is not messing up. When I called for those two tires this past weekend, the first thing I thought about, man, did I just mess up here, and I think about the 380 some employees we have here at Stewart‑Haas Racing, did that one decision I made put everybody in a bad spot and could this be the end of it. But sometimes you have to make calls from your gut and you worry about what happens later.
My biggest fear is just making the wrong call or doing the wrong thing. I want those guys to be proud of me. Like I told Rodney, I just want to do you a good job and hope you can be proud of me, so that's what I want to get done.

Q. And just as a follow to that, along those same lines, do you feel like you and Rodney are similar in terms of kind of how you go about things? Is it a big personality shift for Kevin and the team in this big situation?
TONY GIBSON: No, I don't think so. Me and Rodney have a really, really good relationship, along with Kevin. I know you guys seen it before, me and Rodney, we do a lot of things off track together. We go side by siding together, and we do a lot of things, we have a lot of things in common that we love to do, so we've got a friendship outside of the racetrack part of it and the racing side of it, which I think kind of helps all that, kind of merge a little easier.
And like I said, I don't have an agenda in this whole deal coming into it. I don't have a personal agenda. I have a company agenda of winning a championship. We sit down like we've sat down this week already, and we'll sit down again and go over our plan for the weekend and talk to Harvick in the truck all the time. This week was easy because he didn't have a motor home and he was in the truck with us all weekend long, so we could talk about things and go over strategy and how things are going in practice, what we need to do for the race. So we'll do the same thing this weekend. We'll just take it step by step, and that relationship‑‑ I would talk to Rodney every night, text him through the day. So it all went really well, and I think this weekend hopefully will go just as smooth.

Q. You've been around for a long time. I'm curious, where does this rank among the challenges that you've had when you look at a team that's lost its car chief, lost its crew chief and is trying to perform in a championship situation amid people questioning the team's integrity?
TONY GIBSON: Yeah, you know, it's normal, right? People should. When you take two of the key people off, you always wonder whether it's a quarterback or a running back or a wide receiver, can the others step up and do a good job. I think that's where Rodney and this company at Stewart‑Haas has done a good job. We have a lot of depth here at this company.
For me personally, I would say the closest thing to this situation was back in 1992 when we were racing for a championship with Alan Kulwicki and I was the field guy back then, and we came down‑‑ it came down to a green flag fuel stop, and Alan was coming down pit road, and I step over and I realize I'm the only guy on pit road, and we're the only car on pit road. And I had to get 3.2 seconds of fuel in this thing to make it to the end, and if I don't get it in there and if I don't do my job, then it all lays on my shoulders. That's probably the last time I've been in this situation with this much load on it. It would have been in 1992.

Q. And do you feel that the team at all has‑‑ I don't want to say a chip on its shoulder, but feel like they have something to prove, that‑‑ after the penalty and the perception of it?
TONY GIBSON: No, I don't think so. I think they‑‑ this team right here, when you get down inside it and watch how it works on the inside, they approach every race to win races, not to win stages or points or lead laps. It's about winning races no matter what the circumstances are, and I think that they don't really have a chip on their shoulder about anyone in particular or anything. It's just they want to show everybody that they are the best and they deserve to be in this position to fight for a championship.
You know, I think personally, all these guys want to step up and show Rodney that, you know what, we are a great team, and you have built an awesome race team here, and we want to show you that‑‑ how mature we are as a group and how we can function as a group, even when our leader is not with us. We can still follow your lead and we can still get this done.

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