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Ryan Preece Explains Incident Between Him And Ty Gibbs At Texas That Saw Gibbs Wreck

May 5, 2026  ·
  John Trent

Ryan Preece shared more details about the incident between him and Ty Gibbs that ended up in Gibbs wrecking into the outside wall following a restart on lap 101.

As the two were coming through turns 3 and 4, Gibbs spun with Preece right on his bumper and slammed hard into the outside wall while the two were racing each other back around the 20th position.

In car footage from Preece’s car and the accompany team radio indicate that Preece was upset with Gibbs after he dove underneath him into turn 1 and seemingly slid up the track forcing Preece to lift and lost multiple spots Preece commented on his radio saying, “What a [expletive] idiot that kid is! He is so lucky his car is so [expletive] fast!

After the caution flew, Preece then promised, “Alright, when I get to that 54, I’m done with him. [Expletive] idiot. … That car is so [expletive] fast. [Expletive] pisses me off. Stupid. I’m gonna vent for 15 seconds. I can’t stand when idiots like him have fast race cars that they can do stupid [expletive] and get away with it. End of rant.”

Later in the race, Preece got to the back bumper of Gibbs and Gibbs went into the outside wall. After Gibbs wrecked, Preece said, “Never touched him.” He also said that, “He can come on over and see me later.”

Following the race, Preece said, “I’ll be honest with you. I hate that he wrecked, but decisions you make on the race track there are repercussions. And I try to race everybody with an amount of respect that I like in return and when you don’t do that, I’m not going to cut you a break. And that’s what happened.”

He shared more details in an interview with SiriusXM, “Basically, I’ll just kinda put it the way I said in the post-race interview yesterday, which is: There’s moments that there are people that you can race with respect around and cut breaks to. I can think of multiple times yesterday that instead of putting another driver in a pretty tough spot you make the decision not to do that. I just grew up racing against people that I learned that lesson a long long time ago when I was a lot younger. Sometimes I question if those same lessons are learned by the time you get to Cup.

“So for me, it was more along the lines, he almost or pretty much was very close clear getting into 3 and I could lift, but I didn’t. I was right there and I felt like he came down and I was not going to cut him a break because in the past him and I have had problems,” he continued. “I’ve got a little bit of a short fuse with him and I and how we’re racing. And that was just one of those situations that could I cut him a break? Probably could’ve, but I didn’t.”

Preece then reiterated that he didn’t think he made contact with Gibbs, “And ultimately I didn’t feel like I hit him. I felt like I stayed right on him and he got loose and from there on unfortunately he wrecked. But I think that’s just the way it is. The decisions you make on the race track, people are going to make their decisions back. And that’s just the way racing is. That’s no different than what is from what you see at your local race tracks of people there or regionally or whatever it is. It’s been around as long as time. It’s kind of an unwritten code or unspoken thing. That’s kind of the way it went down.”

Gibbs had a very different perspective on the incident. On his in-car radio at the time of the incident, he said, “I’ll get him another time.”

He also told reporters following the race, “I haven’t seen the replay. It broke one of the little welds on the front clip, so it probably wasn’t the best decision to go back out. We weren’t going to be fast, so we’ll go racing next week.”

On X, he reacted to Preece’s rant on his radio, “Hmm, atleast he is honest.”

NEXT: Kyle Busch Explains Why He Intentionally Wrecked John Hunter Nemechek In The Final Laps At Texas

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Author: John Trent