Carson Hocevar doesn’t play around when it comes to Spire Motorsports, and he has now found his moment to shine. It’s no secret that the Joe Gibbs Racing lawsuit against Chris Gabehart has now become Spire’s problem, too. As the organization sues Gabehart for extracting confidential and important data for Hocevar’s team, the 23-year-old did not skip a beat in defending his team as Spire Motorsports finds itself deeply involved with the lawsuit.

Taking to X, Hocevar poked fun at Joe Gibbs’ decision to hire a private investigator to track Gabehart’s movements.

“They needed a PI for this? They could’ve just walked next door. That’s known as “Jeff’s table,” Carson Hocevar wrote online.

It was a screenshot of a map showing a three-minute route between the GR Garage and a nearby restaurant in Mooresville, along with a photo listing for the GR garage facility. The joke implied that Gabehart’s meeting with Spire Motorsports’ owner Jeff Dickerson was hardly a secret, suggesting anyone in the garage area already knew where those conversations typically happened.

That jab arrived as part of the growing legal battle between GR and its former employee after his move to Spire Motorsports. In court filings seeking expedited fact discovery, the NASCAR powerhouse has disclosed that it had hired a private investigator to monitor the defendants after the Cup Series season ended in November last year.

The organization argues that quickly gathering evidence is crucial as it attempts to determine whether Spire obtained any confidential competition data when Gabehart joined the team.

One of the more eye-catching details surfaced in the exhibit C filed late Friday night through Sunday morning. There, JGR revealed it had retained North Carolina-licensed private investigator Ryan Simpson from Barefoot Private Investigation to observe Gabehart’s interactions.

In his sworn declaration, Simpson described a specific encounter he documented on December 2, 2025, when he watched the former JGR employee arrive at the Spire Motorsports facility at 11:54 am. A few minutes later, at 12:02 p.m., Dickerson was seen entering Gabehart’s vehicle, an interaction the investigator said was captured through still images taken from video footage.

Simpson‘s timeline continued with the pair leaving the facility and heading to a nearby restaurant, arriving at 12:22 pm. According to the filing, Gabehart and Dickerson remain seated together there for over an hour until 1:47 p,m with additional photographs included to show them sitting across the table from one another. The two then departed and returned to the Spire facility at 2 pm, when the investigator recorded Dickerson exiting the vehicle.

While the surveillance details are now part of the official court record, Hocevar’s tongue-in-cheek response quickly reminded fans that in the tight-knit Mooresville racing community, very little goes unnoticed for long. And if the young drivers’ jabs are any indication, the lawsuit drama between Joe Gibbs and Gabehart is already becoming a source of garage area humor as well as legal intrigue.

Moreover, to strengthen JGR’s request, the organization also submitted multiple declarations from figures across the NASCAR garage. These included statements from team competition director Wally Brown, driver Denny Hamlin, Toyota executive Andy Gray, and fellow team owner Bob Jenkins.

According to the filings, their testimonies were meant to emphasize how valuable proprietary race data can be to the team, which believes it must quickly establish whether any such information changed hands when Gabehart departed.

And Hamlin didn’t mince words in his statement.

Denny Hamlin goes up against Chris Gabehart

Even without directly referencing Denny Hamlin’s long relationship with Chris Gabehart, his statement about the data at the center of the escalating lawsuit still highlights the uncomfortable reality of the situation. The veteran driver stressing the potential value of that information is the same one who spent years working side-by-side with Gabehart on the No. 11 team.

“I have reviewed the description of the materials Gabehart apparently retained on his personal cell phone and personal Google Drive account as described in the Walter Brown declaration. This information represents the crown jewels of our racing operation,” he said.

“These materials provide a comprehensive roadmap for JGR’s competitive strategies and are the exact set of proprietary and confidential information any of JGR’s competitors would want to understand JGR’s processes, technological capabilities, and payment structures that have led to JGR’s overwhelming success.”

Hamlin and Gabehart were among NASCAR’s most recognizable driver-crew chief duos from 2019 through 2024, guiding his team through multiple race wins and championship runs. Gabehart was widely regarded as the strategic mind atop Hamlin’s pit box, helping shape race day decisions and long-term performance gains.

However, last year, Gayheart stepped away from the pit box to take up the role of competition director within the organization. This promotion definitely gave him even greater access to the teams’ internal systems, ranging from performance data to engineering processes and competitive strategy.

That access now sits squarely at the center of the $8 million legal battle, with the organization arguing that any information leaving its walls could offer a significant advantage to rivals across the NASCAR garage.