Ross Chastain has a simple answer to the questions of where and why his Trackhouse Racing team has fallen off the last few years in the NASCAR Cup Series.
“We just haven’t kept up with the garage, in my opinion,” he said in response to a question from RACER this week ahead of the event at Darlington Raceway (Sunday, 3 p.m. ET). “There are cars that we used to outrun easily that now I look at their bumper. They used to comment to us about being tired of looking at the back of the 1 car and now that’s just not the case.
“It’s balance and speed. We’re racing in a circle it’s really as simple as that. We haven’t picked up the speed others have.”
Chastain won four races in 2022 and ’23. Trackhouse came out of the box strong in 2022 when Chastain joined the organization in a second car alongside Daniel Suarez, and he came within 235 feet of winning the ’22 championship — a measurement that lives forever on the team’s Concord, North Carolina campus as it was painted on the pavement outside of the entrance.
But a year ago, Chastain went winless in the regular season and failed to earn a playoff berth. He did win before the year was over at Kansas Speedway, but the team finished 19th in the championship standings. From 2022 to 2024, Chastain’s top-five finishes and laps led have decreased year over year.
“We went into the Gen 7 car through the testing process in the middle of a transition from to Trackhouse, and we hit on some things that made the cars go fast compared to the competition,” Chastain said. “I did the Charlotte test on the oval before the season started, and we were out there, and people were spinning out, and I was about to wreck, and then they made a big, complete setup change just to try something, and I pulled on the track in the first corner, and I had goosebumps down the frontstretch. I hadn’t felt that yet.