CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Ty Gibbs understands why some struggle to grasp how an 18-year-old without a single minute of experience at NASCAR’s national level just won his very first race.

He’d never driven an Xfinity Series car before, never participated in a live pit stop, and then without any practice or qualifying, Gibbs beat reigning series champion Austin Cindric on the road course at Daytona International Speedway.

But, how?

“You know what Pop Warner football is, right?” said the grandson of three-time Super Bowl winning coach Joe Gibbs. “It’s like taking a quarterback from the Pop Warner Football League and putting him in a college football game, a big bowl game, and you’re not allowed to stretch. You’re going in there cold, you might pull a muscle, but you’re firing off into the game.”

OK, so that’s what it felt like to Gibbs. But a Pop Warner quarterback is unlikely to lead a college football team to a bowl game victory, much the same way a rookie isn’t supposed to beat 39 other drivers who all had far more experience than Gibbs.

Gibbs had never even heard the engine in his Toyota until he turned it on moments before last month’s race. He’d never used a switch panel like the one inside the Xfinity car, was unfamiliar with the dashboard and even the placement of the window was a new thing.

Gibbs credits the successful debut to visualization techniques he’s relied on in his short racing career. He’d only run two full seasons at lower levels of competition before this year but won seven of his 23 outings.

“What I really enjoy is when I can see it in my brain, when I can envision what I am doing, I know I can put myself in there and do it,” Gibbs said. “I feel like that’s one of the skills that I’ve been blessed with and one of the tools that’s helped me. Like a golf swing, if I feel like I can do it with my eyes closed, I feel like I can just out the same thing to a race car.”