There’s an eight-letter word that isn’t uttered, at least not often, at Trackhouse Racing Team’s headquarters in Concord, N.C.
It’s not a vulgarity you wouldn’t say in front of your mother.
But it is a word that will all have sorts of “implications” tied to it once the NASCAR season reaches a certain point in its season.
And thanks to Ross Chastain‘s dramatic wins at Circuit of the Americas and Talladega Superspeedway, it’s a word that will have implications for Trackhouse in just its second year of existence.
That word: Playoffs.
“I’m being honest when I say that ‘playoffs’ isn’t a word that’s uttered in our building at all,” Marks said Sunday (April 24) after Chastain’s second career victory. “We still have to go to a lot of tracks with this racecar that we’ve never been to before. We still have a lot to learn. We’re committed to the process of learning this car, figuring out the right approach to this car.
“I’m being totally honest with you. We don’t talk about that at all because it’s so new, everything is just so new. We’re just trying to do a good job every day.”
Just how new is everything?
While Trackhouse Racing is in year two of its project, so much of its makeup is based on what came before.
Sure, there’s the Next Gen car.
But the majority of Trackhouse’s employees — about 105-110 of 120 and including Chastain — made the transition to the new regime when Marks and co-owner Pitbull bought out Chip Ganassi Racing. Trackhouse also moved into Ganassi’s old campus.
“It was important for me to keep a lot of those people because they know that building, they know workflow in that building, they’re used to working together,” Marks said after Chastain’s COTA win in March. “It’s a pretty tall mountain to climb if you put 120 people together that have never worked together and say, ‘Go do this.’”
Together, those 120 employees have delivered two wins in the last five…
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