Representative image: Spire Motorsports cars on pit road at Auto Club Speedway, 2022. Photo: TaurusEmerald / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Spire Motorsports has sidelined Chris Gabehart. It just won’t say when. In a Sept. 29 brief opposing Joe Gibbs Racing’s motion to hold the team and Gabehart in contempt, Spire told a federal court that Gabehart “is on administrative leave” (page 15) and that it “has now placed Gabehart on administrative leave” (page 25). Neither page says when the leave started. The case is Joe Gibbs Racing, LLC v. Gabehart, No. 3:26-cv-00133 (W.D.N.C.).
JGR filed the contempt motion in mid-September. The brief doesn’t say whether the leave is paid, whether it covers his whole job or only the Chief Motorsports Officer duties Spire hired him for, or when it ends. Judge Susan Rodriguez has not ruled on it, and no hearing date for the motion has been made public. We previewed the motion last month.
What Spire’s brief lists
Spire uses the leave as the last item in a list of steps it says it took on its own. Its dates, from the brief and from Gabehart’s separate opposition:
- Feb. 27: Gabehart’s Spire laptop is taken and quarantined with Spire’s forensic examiner.
- March 2: the temporary restraining order is entered.
- March 18: Spire revokes his access to company systems. Gabehart’s brief lists email, Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint.
- April 23: the preliminary injunction is entered. (The judge had earlier let him keep the Spire job.)
- May 5: Spire’s president emails the company that Gabehart works in “an executive capacity focused on Spire’s overall strategic vision.”
- Late May or early June: co-owner Jeff Dickerson testified he removed Gabehart from all Cup Series meetings.
- Sept. 29: the brief reports the leave, undated.
Spire says it is “not subject to” the court’s orders, which bind Gabehart, and that it took “extraordinary steps” anyway. It attributes the decision to pull him from Cup meetings and races to JGR’s “litigious nature.” It asks the court to deny the motion and to award Spire its attorneys’ fees for responding.
What the other filings say
Gabehart’s own opposition, filed the same day, does not mention the leave. It puts his Cup Series meeting attendance at five to twelve of about 260 meetings this season, citing testimony from two Spire employees, and says he answered a March 28 text from driver Carson Hocevar about his car’s handling with “Stop.”
JGR’s Oct. 8 reply on its separate renewed injunction motion does not mention the leave either. It says Spire “continues to employ Gabehart” after a JGR document turned up on his laptop, and that Spire “made no change to his compensation or facility access after the PI Order.” JGR’s Oct. 6 reply on the contempt motion carries a PACER fee and was not available to us, so we can’t say how it treats the leave. Both sides’ allegations are untested, and the court has not ruled on contempt.
Gabehart’s response to JGR’s separate motion for sanctions is due Oct. 14, and the magistrate judge’s Oct. 7 order sets Oct. 16 as the deadline for the parties to finish document production. We covered the earlier fights over JGR’s dropped claim and the text in Heather Gibbs’ files.
Spire cites the leave as proof of good faith, and it surfaced in a brief answering a contempt motion. Is that compliance or damage control?
Sources: Docket, Joe Gibbs Racing, LLC v. Gabehart, No. 3:26-cv-00133 (W.D.N.C.), including Doc. 259 (Gabehart opposition), Doc. 264 (Spire opposition), Doc. 286 (order on motions to compel), Doc. 303 (JGR reply, renewed motion for preliminary injunction), and the Sept. 22 hearing notice. Retrieved from CourtListener.
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