Ty Gibbs has been on a downward slope ever since his maiden Cup win at Bristol earlier, but the situation turned dire at Texas as he hit the wall in the middle of the race. While he didn’t point fingers at anyone for the wreck, a ‘rant’ from a fellow driver, who happened to be too close to him at the time, has been raising some eyebrows.

“When I get to that 54, I’m done with him,” is what Ryan Preece told his team on the radio during the Würth 400 at Texas Motor Speedway. The No. 60 RFK Racing driver was clearly frustrated by the No. 54 JGR car’s movements on track, and made no attempts to hide it.

“That car is so fucking fast, pisses me off. I can’t stand when idiots like him have fast race cars where they can do stupid shit and get away with it. End of rant,” Preece added.

The context makes Preece’s frustration easier to understand. He had been one of the stronger performers at Texas early on, running competitively near the front. But a Ford these days is always under the looming threat from Toyotas. Moreover, there is the fact that Preece is a racer running on borrowed time and in a seat that will cease to exist in ten months.

Interestingly, though, Preece was right behind Gibbs on the exit of the corner when the No. 54 went into the wall on Lap 101, ending Gibbs’ race. But the angle of the available footage made the incident genuinely difficult to read. And Gibbs, in a stark contrast, declined to point fingers, towards himself or anyone else — at least immediately.

“I haven’t seen the replay, so I don’t know,” he told Pockrass after the DNF.

But there was more to it.

Even though Preece maintained that he “never touched him [Gibbs],” Shane van Gisbergen, who was running directly behind the duo when the incident unfolded, offered a vivid counter-perspective over his team radio: “Holy shit! He just committed a murder! It looks like he just full-throttled him!”

Moreover, many replaying the clip from SVG’s on-board cam also claimed that Ryan Preece had put Ty Gibbs into the wall. This, however, could not be confirmed at the moment, considering how sensitive the situation was.

Gibbs, for his part, eventually came across Preece’s radio rant and responded on social media with a dose of dry wit: “Hmm, atleast he is honest.”

That said, the frustration Preece carried toward Gibbs, visible after the completion of stage 1, added an undeniable layer of suspicion to the incident, even if evidence remains elusive. NASCAR’s own race recap described it as “slight contact from Ryan Preece” that sent Gibbs spinning. That is some measured language, but still enough to keep the conversation running.

Gibbs joins the ‘Texas spinners’ list

Texas Motor Speedway hadn’t been kind to anyone all weekend. What started with Bubba Wallace’s practice shunt snowballed into a race that produced multiple cautions for nearly similar reasons. In total, four separate spinning incidents brought out the yellow flag (William Byron at Lap 92, Gibbs at Lap 101, Kyle Larson at Lap 160, and John Hunter Nemechek late in the event). There was also a fifth spin narrowly occurring right before the white flag.

The characteristics were strikingly similar across all of them: a driver enters or exits a corner, loses grip from the rear, rotates, and the back end finds the wall. In Todd Gilliland’s case, the front end found Christopher Bell instead, triggering the race’s first caution on Lap 68.

Texas is one of the more peculiar venues on the Cup schedule, and its quirks are the product of a complicated history. The speedway opened in 1997 with uniform 24-degree banking across all four turns. By 2016, the aging asphalt had begun absorbing water like a sponge, and a full reconfiguration followed in 2017.

Turns 1 and 2 were flattened to 20 degrees of banking and widened from 60 to 80 feet, while Turns 3 and 4 were left untouched at 24 degrees, resulting in a track that functions like two different circuits stitched together.

“This is Texas, it’s treacherous,” Wallace correctly told the media after his practice crash.

That asymmetry is the root of most of the chaos. The flatter, wider Turns 1 and 2 reduced the banking that keeps cars planted through the corner. A bump above the tunnel in Turns 3 and 4, which has worsened much in the Next Gen era, means that any car venturing off the preferred low line risks bottoming out, breaking traction, and spinning into the outside wall. Moreover, cars trying to race side-by-side in Turns 3 and 4 regularly end up with the outside car spinning out. It is a feature of a surface that has confounded teams and drivers since the 2017 repave.

The track surface also reacts sharply to temperature changes across a single race weekend, meaning grip levels that felt adequate in practice can vanish mid-race.

Ty Gibbs’ crash was entirely consistent with that pattern. And the sequence is particularly cruel given his momentum.  After Bristol, he backed it up with a ninth-place finish at Kansas, extending his top-10 streak to seven consecutive races, before a multi-car crash at Talladega ended that run, and now Texas has complicated what had been a career-best stretch for him.