As Motorsport.com reports, Joe Gibbs Racing is pushing the Western District of North Carolina to slap Chris Gabehart and Spire Motorsports with civil contempt of court. The team claims both defendants completely blew past the temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction handed down back in March.
Now, JGR wants the court to drag the defendants back in to explain themselves. This whole mess is tangled up in an ongoing lawsuit and countersuit between the three parties, kicking off when Gabehart walked away from JGR at the end of last season. They accused him of breaching his contract and walking off with proprietary information to help Spire.
Since this legal battle got rolling, the court explicitly ordered that Gabehart cannot offer services to Spire that look anything like the competition director duties he handled at Gibbs during the 2025 season. That means zero preparation or execution of car and race strategies, no overseeing analytics to boost performance, and no stepping into weekly competition or post-race meetings. Giving input on setups, aerodynamics, and operations was also strictly off the table.
Yet Gibbs is telling the court that Gabehart has been doing precisely those things all season long. According to their motion, Spire enabled the whole workaround by handing him a 'Chief Motorsports Officer' title and an 'all things racing' gig that JGR calls entirely deceptive. JGR argues that Spire failed to put any meaningful restrictions on Gabehart until months after the litigation had already kicked off.
“JGR respectfully requests that the Court order Gabehart and Spire to appear and show cause why they should not be held in contempt for failure to comply with this Court’s TRO and PI, find that their conduct is contemptuous, award JGR its costs and fees in bringing this Motion, and grant any other relief to which JGR is justly entitled,” reads the motion.
To back up these claims, JGR dumped dozens of documents into the case file, including email records, depositions, and text messages. One filed example shows that on March 21, 2026, while the TRO was completely active, Gabehart was talking technical details about Spire’s No. 77 and No. 71 cars with Matt McCall, who serves as Spire’s Cup Series competition director.
Another instance arrived just a week later on March 28, 2026. Spire’s top Cup Series driver Carson Hocevar texted Gabehart about specific technical difficulties with his car, and Gabehart simply texted back: 'stop.'
