Trackhouse Racing Is An Instant Powerhouse

Just 2+ seasons into its existence, Justin Marks' outfit might already be NASCAR's best.

A couple of years ago, Trackhouse Racing was still more dream than reality. The brainchild of driver-turned-businessman Justin Marks had struggled to buy a NASCAR charter, leasing one instead from Spire Motorsports (which itself had recently been assembled from the ashes of Furniture Row Racing), with one driver — 29-year-old Daniel Suarez — who had washed out with more prestigious teams and was now on his fourth organization in as many years. Suarez had talent, but he wasn’t consistently running up front, with an average finish of 20.1 and an adjusted points per race 23 percent worse than the Cup Series average.

If this was the future of NASCAR, it was difficult to see at the time.

And yet, fast-forward to early 2023, and it’s getting hard to argue Trackhouse isn’t one of the top teams in the Cup Series — if not the best. While its drivers haven’t scored a win yet this season, and rivals such as Hendrick Motorsports impressed with a 1-2-3 finish in Vegas on Sunday, Trackhouse’s average car is beating Hendrick’s — and therefore the rest of NASCAR as well — for the second consecutive year. In an instant, an also-ran has turned into the class of the sport.

Here’s the proof: Since the start of 2022, Trackhouse has the highest rate of Top 5s (29.1% of race entries) and Top 10s (49.4%) of any Cup Series team, with the best average finish (14.6) and most adjusted points (37.1) per driver, per race. In that final category, they are a series-high 44 percent better than the NASCAR average.

Some of that has to do with running a two-car team (with some exceptions, such as the “Project91” initiative that saw former F1 champ Kimi Raikkonen drive Trackhouse’s No. 91 car at Watkins Glen last season). The averages for the bigger teams can be dragged down by their worst performers. But still, you can stack up Trackhouse’s top two of Suarez and Ross Chastain against any other 1-2 punch in the sport right now, a testament to how much each has leveled up as a driver in a very short period of time.

Suarez has dramatically improved his racecraft since Trackhouse’s debut season of 2021, converting peak track position into strong finishes far more often now than early in his career. (An average per-race high position of 6.4 only turned into an average finish of 20.1 for Suarez in 2021; this year, an average high position of 2.0 has turned into an average finish of 7.0.) Suarez finally has a positive green-flag pass differential (+15.3 per race) and his adjusted points per race is 95% higher than that of the average driver, a career high.

Meanwhile, Chastain’s meteoric gains in performance — and fame — have mirrored Trackhouse’s rise over the past few seasons. When he transferred teams for 2022 after Marks bought Chip Ganassi Racing, the former watermelon farmer had seen some success in the Xfinity Series but was a Cup Series journeyman with zero career wins and only nine Top 10s in 115 races. By season’s end, however, he was possibly the most famous driver in the sport, thanks to the video-game maneuver he pulled to move up from 10th to fifth on the final lap at Martinsville and advance to the Championship 4.

And Chastain had substance to go with the style. I have a metric that compares a driver’s adjusted points each race to a weighted combination of adjusted points from four comparison points:

• Teammates (50% weight)

• Drivers who started within +/- 5 spots on the grid (32.5% weight)

• Drivers in the same car manufacturer (12.5% weight)

• All drivers in the field (5% weight)

Against that standard of comparison, Chastain’s 44.5 adjusted points per race was 16.6 higher than expected, the best mark of any driver in the Cup Series last season. And this season, it’s Suarez who is seventh among full-time drivers at +14.0. For a pair of drivers who had been negative performers throughout their Cup careers until joining Trackhouse, it’s incredible to see both now sitting at or near the top of the driver standings.

All of this means even greater expectations for the future, of course. As impressive as Trackhouse’s overall performance has been since the start of last season, they admittedly haven’t won as frequently as their newfound competitors at the top of the team rankings. That will probably need to change some if they want to cash in on their championship aspirations — strong as those may currently be, with Chastain leading the points (and trying to improve on last year’s No. 2 finish) and Suarez gunning for a title of his own (after moving up from 25th to 10th and now fourth in the standings in the span of just a few seasons). It’s a good problem to have, though, especially when you consider where this team — and its drivers — were just a few years ago, and how far they’ve all come since.

---

Filed under: NASCAR