AUSTIN, Texas — They said they were going to disrupt things.
When Trackhouse Racing announced its launch on Oct. 7, 2020, co-owner Justin Marks’ intent to form a NASCAR Cup Series operation hadn’t been fully shaped. The big, broad goals were there, though, and they included ambitions in the worlds of education, equity and entertainment.
The competition part? That’s been the backbone of the team’s overall mission. The 2021 campaign represented those first small steps at the end of the Gen-6 car era that helped Trackhouse get its foot in the garage door. Sunday marked the next big steps toward kicking that door in.
Trackhouse’s drivers – Ross Chastain and Daniel Suárez — led 46 of the 69 laps in Sunday’s EchoPark Automotive Grand Prix at the Circuit of The Americas in just its sixth race as a two-car operation. Chastain, the 29-year-old journeyman driver who comes from a long family line of watermelon farmers, had all the right moves at the end, holding off road-course maestro AJ Allmendinger in a topsy-turvy finish.
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Getting there, though? That required a significant leap of faith, from the group that joined Marks’ cause when the organization was still in its embryonic phase, to the 100-plus people now on the Trackhouse payroll.
“The pitch was, let’s build a great team together. Let’s do all of this together,” Marks said. “That was the inside-of-the-building pitch. The outside-of-the-building pitch is this sport is ready for challengers. It’s ready for disruptors. It’s ready for people to come in and challenge the status quo and how we do things, have some fun, look good, try to be fast, win races, have a good time doing it.
“I just have always been authentic about my mission. I just take a lot of pride in seeing everybody’s smiles and happiness today. The pitch was, let’s just do something great together.”
The on-ramp to that greatness may have started nearly two years ago, but the goals accelerated with its rapid expansion to a two-car fleet this season. When Marks announced the purchase of Chip Ganassi’s long-running Cup Series effort last summer, one of the first calls he received that day was from Chastain, who was rounding out his lone full season with Ganassi’s bunch.
His message in a subsequent text was simple: “I want this.”
That’s little surprise from a competitor who has scraped to drive everything he could to stay in the game, entering a whopping 77 national-series races just three years ago. After his career’s many starts, stops and destinations, and after an 0-for-120 kickoff to his Cup tenure, Chastain is finally a Cup Series winner – something that hadn’t quite clicked for him as the sun set on the Texas capital.
Chastain had taken the leap with Marks, and the Trackhouse co-owner had his mutual faith rewarded by its newest driver.
“I’m a good couch racer,” Chastain said. “I believed for a long time, but Justin asked me on the frontstretch, ‘do you believe yet?’ I would say that I still struggle with that.”
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The celebration was a blur, but very real. Chastain picked up his hitch-hiking brother, Chad, for part of the cool-down lap, and the siblings screamed in jubilation inside the No. 1 Chevrolet. Chastain’s signature victory celebration christened COTA’s main straightaway with a watermelon smash, and the fruit flecks remained in a clump with Texas-shaped confetti hours after the checkered flag.
The moments continued in Victory Lane, and the arrival of Trackhouse president Ty Norris meant a bear hug that lifted Chastain’s driving shoes off the ground. It was Norris who had weeks ago warned the team against complacency after its early season success — surprising to some, but not within Trackhouse’s walls as top-five finishes continued to build.
“Look, this is not the time to stop,” Chastain recalled Norris saying from the shop. “This is not the time to rest on what we’re doing. Yes, it’s great, but this is what we’re here to do. We’re winners. Believe it. You keep building the cars like this, Daniel and Ross can win.”
Sunday felt like affirmation of what’s been a rapidly growing notion, that Trackhouse would soon join the list of winning organizations at NASCAR’s top level. The only questions still outstanding were which driver and when, questions that still wavered during Sunday’s race. Suárez was dominant early, leading all 15 laps of the opening stage until a bump and a Turn 1 spin in Stage 2 left him playing catch-up.
The power steering gave up on Suárez’s No. 99 Chevy for the later portions of the race. Chastain took the baton from there.
Suárez had reiterated the oft-repeated sentiment in a Saturday press conference, saying that wins were soon approaching for Trackhouse. During the same presser, local media asked Suárez if he’d soaked in any local flavor, and the Mexican-born driver applauded the fare at a trendy East Austin restaurant called Suerte.
Translated from Spanish, “suerte” means “luck.” None was needed Sunday for the latest challengers to the status quo.
“It hasn’t slowed down,” Chastain said, “and I don’t expect it to slow down.”