Another Building Block For Trackhouse Racing

CONCORD, N.C. — Building a successful race team at the top level of the sport is no easy task.

Trackhouse Racing took another step in that direction on Sunday night when Ross Chastain won the Coca-Cola 600 in dramatic fashion at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

It was the biggest victory of Chastain’s career and another feather in the cap of team owner Justin Marks.

It was a crowning moment for the entire Trackhouse team as Chastain crashed his primary Chevrolet during practice on Saturday and the team built a new No. 1 machine overnight, which he drove from last (40^th) starting position to win NASCAR’s longest race.

Marks candidly discussed the process of trying to build a team that can consistently compete with Hendrick Motorsports, Joe Gibbs Racing, Team Penske and the sport’s other super teams.

“What have I learned along the way? This is a people game. I mean, I do really work hard on trying to get talented people motivated to do really good work,” Marks said. “I feel like when I sit up here, I say a lot of cliches. It’s true. It’s really true.

“You can have an organization with a lot of money and a lot of people that can’t figure out how to all work together and put fast things on the race track. That’s certainly possible. You know, we’re not as big of an organization as those three, but we do continue to grow.

“Right now, I think provides an opportunity for us to relook at that delta between us and those big teams as we go through the struggles that we are right now,” Marks continued. “We’re looking at things like developing a more robust aero department, looking at the way we structure our engineering, looking at those things to make sure we get back on the development curve with those three.

“It just takes very thoughtful examination, and it’s a process that probably will never stop because Hendrick Motorsports, Joe Gibbs Racing, and Penske Racing are just very, very strong, talented organizations. I think the fact that we’ve won nine races in three and a half years, it’s a lot of motivation for everybody in our company to just keep trying to work toward that.”

Marks takes pride in the fact that many of Trackhouse Racing’s nine Cup Series victories have had history involved with them.

“You know what’s funny is and we had this talk in victory lane. Tony Lunders, our competition director, came up to me and he was like, ‘Man, it just seems like all of our wins, there’s some — there’s no boring win that Trackhouse has had. It’s all some kind of story.’ It’s funny how that happens,” Marks said. “It happened at Chicago with Shane (van Gisbergen) and everything.

“It’s really neat that our wins typically have some kind of historical context around them. Like Ross winning at Phoenix, being the first one I guess in the modern era to win that wasn’t in the championship or Daniel winning the closest three-wide finish ever, those kinds of things. Then a really, really cool stat like that.”

He was likewise proud of his team’s effort in preparing Chastain’s winning car.

“I think it’s just really a powerful testament to everybody that works for the team and that chipped in this weekend, chipped in last night, ordered the pizzas, stayed up until 2 o’clock in the morning, got there before the sun came up to button up the car and everything,” Marks said. “To be able to look at all them, they’re all tired right now. They’ve been working basically 48 hours straight. They’re on their way home right now, and they’re going to lay their head on their pillow. They have to be at the shop tomorrow at 9 o’clock, 8 o’clock. Some will be there at 6:00.

“To say something like, ‘You guys did this. You went and got the backup car. You built it overnight. You brought it to the race track and became the first person in I think you said 54 years to win from last place in the Cup Series.’ It’s an amazing thing to put your arm around them and say, You deserve it, you did that. That’s an honor that you have.”