If You Can’t Beat Ross Chastain... Fight Him?
Why NASCAR’s most exciting and polarizing driver is impossible to ignore.
Love him or hate him, Ross Chastain is pretty clearly the biggest star in NASCAR right now. And every week, it seems he does something new to get more eyeballs on the sport. It wasn’t enough to ride the wall at Martinsville, feud with half the Cup Series and needlessly turn contenders into collateral damage early in races. As Noah Gragson learned last Sunday, Chastain will also hit you with a mean right cross if you lay hands on him.
It’s easy to see Chastain, the son of Florida watermelon farmers, as the hero NASCAR needs — a wrecking ball crashing both literally and metaphorically into a series whose best recent drivers were accused of being boring and corporate — but just as easy to view him as a villain. That’s why fans are split on Chastain, and his fellow drivers seem to find him annoying at best — or dangerous at worst. But his antics would be easier to ignore if not for one fact: He’s one hell of a stock car driver, maybe the best in the world.
Whether we look at my index statistics for average finish and Adjusted Points, my Composite Winning % stat or average Driver Rating, Chastain has been either the No. 1 or No. 2 driver in the Cup Series since the beginning of last season:
As I wrote about here, Chastain’s rise has mirrored that of his team, Trackhouse Racing — a renegade outfit of sorts that driver/businessman Justin Marks turned into a consistent contender out of the spare pieces of other teams. Chastain himself wasn’t even eligible for the Cup Series points title until 2021, running primarily in the Xfinity Series and the Trucks (where he did finish 2nd in the 2019 standings) before that. But at Trackhouse, Chastain found a team that matches him perfectly; both are disruptors, trying to shake up a sport that traditionally resists change.
On the track, that mindset can manifest itself in some frankly questionable decision-making, such as this reckless attempt by Chastain to split the middle of a crowded pack at Talladega:
That move put Gragson in the wall and led to Larson taking one of the hardest hits we’ve seen in the Next Gen Car era. Then, just a week later, Chastain came into a corner way too hot on backmarker Brennan Poole, spinning the No. 15 car down to the apron and back up the track… where an unsuspecting Larson collected it while Chastain drove on.
As Larson said of Chastain after that incident, “His errors never affect him negatively.” Poole was less diplomatic: “[He] probably needs to get his butt whooped.” And maybe that was on Gragson’s mind when he stepped up to Chastain after the Kansas race on Sunday. Yet Chastain still came out on top — he landed the first and only punch of the encounter. I personally found it amusing that after so much chatter from so many drivers about “someone” needing to fight Chastain, it finally happens (over something relatively minor by Chastain standards), and Chastain still doesn’t really suffer any consequences.
Despite all of that drama, though, Chastain is more than just his Wreck-It Ross reputation. You don’t rank so highly in all of the stats above without immense talent. And that’s the rub for opponents like Gragson, who is younger and was just as successful (if not more so) in the Trucks and Xfinity Series, but has a career average finish 34% worse than the Cup Series average and just 1 Top 10 to his name in 30 starts. Gragson may eventually reach the same level as Chastain — both as a driver and self-promoter — but right now, he can’t match his rival in either regard.
And that’s OK, because few, if any, can.
In the aftermath of Kansas, there was a lot of talk about whether Chastain is a dirty driver with a lack of respect for safety and on-track etiquette, or just the modern reincarnation of someone like Dale Earnhardt Sr. People sometimes forget now, but Dale Sr. was known as The Intimidator for a reason — he moved you out of his way come hell or high water. If that meant wrecking you, he genuinely did not care. No less an authority than Dale Jr. weighed in on this comparison during his podcast this week, which itself led to some funny reactions.
Junior was right that Chastain — and NASCAR itself — has an opportunity to capitalize on Chastain’s growing fame as a wrecking ball and heel. Dale Sr. wasn’t The Man In Black until marketing campaigns made him that. Earnhardt winning seven titles helped, too… and as we’ve seen, Chastain has the driving chops to back up his behavior.
But Chastain could also mellow out over time. That’s why I think Kyle Petty had the best take this week, comparing Chastain to a younger Joey Logano. There was a time when the mega-talented Logano was a massive villain for dumping opponents and generally driving disrespectfully. But he was eventually handed his comeuppance (by mild-mannered Matt Kenseth, of all people), getting knocked out of the 2015 title chase after pushing around the wrong driver too many times. And don’t forget, he also got punched in the face by Kyle Busch a few seasons later.
Eventually, Logano calmed down some and became a two-time Cup Series champion, graduating to become a more likeable and respected personality (including his appearances on NASCAR broadcasts), even if his old behavior still comes out sometimes. Perhaps Chastain can follow the same path from punk to paragon someday — though it might take learning a few hard lessons from walls and fists along the way.
Filed under: NASCAR