Did You Notice? … Trackhouse Racing’s Shane van Gisbergen earned a 10th-place finish at Kansas Speedway?
It was the first oval top 10 of his NASCAR Cup Series career, a big step forward for the rookie as he gets more reps running in circles.
But it also came too little, too late for the burgeoning NASCAR star to compete for this year’s championship. He’s already been eliminated, out in the Round of 16 while Ross Chastain heads to the Charlotte Motor Speedway ROVAL 13 points below the cut line.
Before we go any further in a playoff-weary year, the old school points wouldn’t be much better. Chastain would rank 13th in the standings without any type of NASCAR postseason, while SVG would be well outside the top 20 despite a record-setting four wins on road courses as a rookie.
What has Trackhouse been missing? We’re now three years removed from Chastain’s Mario Kart moment that left him sitting in the Championship 4. While optimism reigns with Connor Zilisch’s arrival next season, as we’ve seen with the Next Gen chassis, the driver can only make so much of an impact.
So what’s been holding Trackhouse back? The answer comes at the very type of track where they just ran 10th with SVG (and 11th with Chastain).
Since Chastain’s surprise victory at the Coca-Cola 600, Trackhouse has taken a back seat on ovals. Since Memorial Day, the entire organization has a total of just five top-10 finishes on these tracks.
Daniel Suarez, as a lame duck, has two of those results, including a runner-up finish at Daytona International Speedway — the team’s only top five during that stretch. Chastain has picked up two top 10s while SVG took until Kansas to finally break through.
Compare that to other championship-level teams during the same timeframe. Chase Elliott has two wins and seven top-10 finishes. Kyle Larson, who struggled through parts of the summer, has nine top 10s. Denny Hamlin has three wins … you get the picture.
It’s not just that Trackhouse hasn’t closed the deal on ovals. They haven’t led laps. Chastain has been out front for only 14 laps in the last 18 races, the worst stretch of his career with the organization. Suarez isn’t much better (19 laps led) while SVG’s total is misleading: only nine of his laps led since May have been on oval tracks.
SVG has been a completely different animal on road courses, giving hope that speed could rub off on Chastain. But that also makes sense, right? Road courses are places where driver skill has the best chance to overcome a deficiency in equipment.
That’s harder to do on the ovals, where it appears Trackhouse is struggling to keep up with Hendrick and the top-tier teams at Ford and Toyota.
“The question will always be, how do you beat the Big Three?” Chastain said to Zack Albert of NASCAR.com earlier this month. “I think it’s just the nature of the sport and the quantity of people and the quantity of dollars. They’re cubic over there. So yeah, I feel like we can. Justin [Marks] wouldn’t do it, we wouldn’t all pour the effort and money into it if we didn’t think we could go compete.
“And like, we can. We did it at Charlotte [Motor Speedway]. We did it at Kansas last year. We’ve done it. Daniel [Suárez] could have won [Las Vegas Motor Speedway] in the spring, but how do we continue to do that? We do it every now and then. That’s our big question: how did we do it then, and we don’t have an answer, and then how do we do it again? We don’t have an answer, but we’re trying.”
The infusion of Zilisch next year will certainly help, a generational talent in position for double-digit victories and a championship in the NASCAR Xfinity Series. But there’s clearly something missing in the Trackhouse setups that needs to be addressed. The way the schedule is currently designed, just winning on road courses will never be enough.
Did You Notice? … We’ve now had 13 last-lap passes for the win in the last two years of Cup competition? Kansas was the seventh this year, setting a new NASCAR record for a single season. And it was just one year ago where we had not one but two finishes settled by three-thousandths of a second or less (Atlanta Motor Speedway, Kansas Speedway).
There’s no doubt the Kansas overtime finish was one of the most thrilling we’ve seen this year. This track has produced several of the best races of the decade, one of the ovals where the arrival of the Next Gen car has meant better racing. It’s also a weird stat in a year where the quality of NASCAR competition is under scrutiny.
Can a last-lap moment make up for 398.5 miles of boredom? Sometimes. But the circumstances surrounding so many of these moments are what can cloud the statistic. Overtime finishes where the entire field is forced together, sometimes several times in a row. Superspeedway endings where the lead naturally ebbs back and forth between several drivers.
Good racing isn’t always just a stat on a page. It needs to come with contact, drama, character, risk. How many of those 13 last-lap finishes came with all of that?
Did You Notice? … Quick hits before taking off …
- With all the talk about Zilisch and Justin Allgaier, Brandon Jones has flown under the radar this season. He shouldn’t. A guy that missed the NASCAR Xfinity Series playoffs the last two years now has his first multi-win season since 2020. Jones is a long shot for the championship, far behind those two favorites, but simply making the title race would be a huge step after years of middling performances.
- So much has been said about Hamlin and Bubba Wallace this week, no need to add to this space. You can check out plenty of Frontstretch columns on the subject. But to me, this type of conflict was always inevitable when you own a team you’re racing against on the track. Last I checked, NASCAR was an individual sport, and shouldn’t each driver try and race for the win? I thought what separated stock car racing from Formula 1 was every driver being able to race for themselves without team orders. If you do that … what happened on the last lap at Kansas is the risk you take.
Follow Tom Bowles on X at @NASCARBowles
The author of Did You Notice? (Wednesdays) Tom spends his time overseeing Frontstretch’s 40+ staff members as its majority owner and Editor-in-Chief. Based outside Philadelphia, Bowles is a two-time Emmy winner in NASCAR television and has worked in racing production with FOX, TNT, and ESPN while appearing on-air for SIRIUS XM Radio and FOX Sports 1's former show, the Crowd Goes Wild. He most recently consulted with SRX Racing, helping manage cutting-edge technology and graphics that appeared on their CBS broadcasts during 2021 and 2022.
You can find Tom’s writing here, at CBSSports.com and Athlonsports.com, where he’s been an editorial consultant for the annual racing magazine for 15 years.