The year is 2022. Upstart team Trackhouse Racing, co-owned by former driver Justin Marks and musician Pitbull, is in its second season of NASCAR Cup Series competition, and already looking to expand operations. It’s had a solid first season with Daniel Suarez, but now it wants more.
The team has just made the bombshell move of purchasing the NASCAR assets of Chip Ganassi Racing, and just needs a driver for its second car — for which it selects CGR alum Ross Chastain.
Chastain immediately fires out of the gate in 2022 with his first two career Cup wins and later makes the one of the greatest moves in NASCAR history to make the Championship 4. He’s a fiery driver with a great veteran teammate in Suarez, who also reaches victory lane for the first time in 2022.
Fast forward to 2025. Suarez and Chastain have each won additional races between 2023 and 2024. The team has now expanded to three cars with the addition of Repco Supercars Championship legend Shane van Gisbergen. It plans on pulling out a fourth car every now and then, either for its PROJECT91 campaign or for its rookie phenom, Connor Zilisch. It’s shaping up to be a big year for the fifth-year team.
Except that performance it once had when it was still in its development stages is completely out the window.
It’s fair to say that Trackhouse has taken more than a step back in performance. Rookie van Gisbergen currently sits 35th in points — second-to-last in the full-timers — with just one top 10 and 121 points to his name. Suarez is in the middle of the road; he’s 25th in points but is fresh off of back-to-back top 10s heading into the next race at Kansas Speedway.
Then there’s the Melon Man.
While Suarez’s No. 99 can be considered the flagship car for Trackhouse, as it’s the first number the team ever used, Chastain is easily the team’s No. 1 driver — and not just because he literally drives the No. 1. His five wins are the most of any driver in Trackhouse’s short history, and he has consistently contended for top fives and victories, unlike his other teammates.
However, even Chastain hasn’t found race-winning speed recently. Sure, he has two top fives and five top 10s on the season, but at no point has he been able to challenge for a win. He arguably didn’t have the race-winning speed in 2023 either, only managing an 11th-hour win on the season at Kansas (which, fortunately for the No. 1 team, is the next stop on the schedule).
It has reached a point for the Alva, Fla., native where he’s grown visibly frustrated with Trackhouse’s lack of speed. Chastain shared some of those frustrations with reporters following his runner-up finish at Texas Motor Speedway.
”Early in the race I didn’t have any confidence,” Chastain said. “For all of Trackhouse to be qualifying the way we are, we’re definitely missing something there. All three drivers just can’t drive the cars.
”My car gave me confidence at the end. Just no confidence yesterday and the start of the race today. … I can’t drive it if I’m not confident and I’m gonna crash. That’s when you see us qualifying bad, running in the back at the beginning of the race.”
These comments came just a few weeks after Chastain made his season debut in the NASCAR Xfinity Series, driving for a team he’s never driven for before in JR Motorsports. Driving a fifth-part time car he’ll split with van Gisbergen in nine races this season, Chastain praised how much fun it was to drive Hendrick Motorsports-powered racecars.
”It’s about the most fun you can have with your clothes on,” Chastain said after the race. “I’d run a whole lot more [races] if NASCAR would let me. Love doing it, and worked a long time to get here to JRM. I’m glad to be here.”
Is it maybe time for Chastain to move on from Trackhouse? It doesn’t seem like Chevrolet is the problem, as JRM fields Chevrolets in Xfinity and Chastain seemed to really enjoy driving one of them. Trackhouse has taken a very noticeable step back in performance, and it’s hurting all three of its drivers.
Maybe part of it has to do with Pitbull no longer serving as a team owner, so there is some crucial funding within the team that is now gone. Part of it may also be the parity of the Next Gen car (or lack thereof) not allowing Trackhouse to contend higher than back half of the top 10 at best.
Chastain seems to have found himself in a position similar to the one Kevin Harvick had in Stewart-Haas Racing’s final years. When the team has performance issues and everybody’s suffering from it, Chastain will still find a way to break through and drive a rough-handling cars to a quality finish that will keep him in the playoff hunt.
But being in the playoff hunt and being in the championship hunt are two different things, and Chastain is too fiery of a driver to be content with averaging a win per season and coming home with a 10th-place finish in points. Especially in cars that aren’t to anyone at Trackhouse’s liking.
Chastain has been on a grind for his entire career to get to a point of success, and now to settle for cars that he says himself don’t give him confidence? It feels like he won’t stand for that for very long. Maybe a change of scenery is needed.
Obviously, the big question would be where Chastain could go that would feed him higher success than he has now. But at the very least, Chastain’s comments should be a wakeup call to Marks and Trackhouse that it has to figure something out.
A good driver can only stand driving in mediocre equipment for so long before they decide that a change is necessary. Hopefully Chastain isn’t too far along in that mindset, or Trackhouse will have to scramble to figure out what’s next.
Anthony Damcott joined Frontstretch in March 2022. Currently, he is an editor and co-authors Fire on Fridays (Fridays); he is also the primary Truck Series reporter/writer and serves as an at-track reporter. He has also assisted with short track content and social media, among other duties he takes/has taken on for the site. In 2025, he became an official member of the National Motorsports Press Association. A proud West Virginia Wesleyan College alum from Akron, Ohio, Anthony is now a grad student. He is a theatre actor and fight coordinator in his free time.
You can keep up with Anthony by following @AnthonyDamcott on X.