Daniel Suárez winning the third-closest NASCAR race in history. Shane van Gisbergen becoming the first driver to win on their Cup Series debut in 60 years. Ross Chastain stealing a place in the Championship 4 with his rulebook-bending wall ride at Martinsville.
Three of the most viral, genre-defying moments in recent NASCAR history, all tied together by one common thread: all were accomplished by drivers for Trackhouse Racing.
The team founded by Justin Marks and co-owned by Pitbull has a knack for making headlines, either by winning races (only NASCAR behemoths Hendrick Motorsports, Joe Gibbs Racing and Team Penske have more victories in the past three-plus seasons than Trackhouse’s seven), by employing drivers who make any given event must-see TV (see: van Gisbergen’s win on the streets of Chicago last summer or 2007 Formula One world champion Kimi Räikkönen contesting rounds at Watkins Glen and Circuit of the Americas), or by having its Grammy-winning co-owner headline concerts corresponding with major dates on the NASCAR calendar.
Trackhouse is a marketer’s dream, boasting a unique combination of on-track success with off-track intrigue. The team’s headquarters in Concord, North Carolina is filled to the brim with knowledge of the American racing landscape.
“[Marks] is an exceptionally open-minded person. He’s always looking for opportunities, but not opportunities to do things like other people do them, for opportunities for him to do things the way he wants to do them,” former NASCAR Cup Series race winner and Marks’ CARS Tour co-owner Jeff Burton said to ESPN. “He’s very innovative, creative. Over there in the Cup team, they talk about being disruptive and trying to do things differently, and that’s the experience that I’ve had.”
You can understand, then, why Trackhouse would be attractive to MotoGP, whose teams are all owned by outfits based in Western Europe and Japan. While F1 continues to enjoy its boom in popularity in the U.S. and NASCAR continues to deliver dependable ratings (even if they aren’t what they were during stock car racing’s height of popularity 25 years ago), the two-wheeled equivalent of Formula One is still waiting for its “Drive to Survive” moment, the pop-culture crossover from niche audience to…
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