DRIVER REBOOT
Marks, who won the 2016 Xfinity Series race at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, hasn’t competed in NASCAR since 2018. But he still finds time to race, occasionally driving sports cars. In December, he drove a pro late model in the Snowflake 100 at Florida’s Five Flags Speedway.
In his role as an owner, Marks likes the “fact that I’ve driven because it’s going to help me manage my driver better.”
That driver, Daniel Suarez, is aware how his situation potentially looks.
“I feel that many, many people will probably say, ‘Oh, Daniel, you’re crazy, you’re going to enter another new team,’” Suarez sid.
When the 2016 Xfinity Series champion straps into the No. 99 Chevrolet on Feb. 14, he’ll be driving for his fourth Cup Series team in four years.
After losing rides at Joe Gibbs Racing in 2018 and Stewart-Haas Racing in 2019, the 29-year-old driver made a last-minute landing in 2020 at Gaunt Brothers Racing, a Toyota team that had never run a full Cup Series season.
GBR competed with what Suarez described as roughly nine-year-old equipment and finished the season 31st in the standings. Despite being loyal to the team and manufacturer that put a ride together for him, he “put a timeline on them” for what he hoped to see develop competition wise.
“When we got to the line” he had drawn, he began talking to Marks.
“If this was another new team, I wasn’t gonna take this option because I had some pretty, pretty good options out there,” Suarez made clear. “Trackhouse, RCR I feel like the combination of these two was something that really caught my eye.”
Their partnership was announced Oct. 7.
Suarez likes that Marks wants “to do things right.”
“He will work very hard to try to pull this together for a while,” Suarez said. “I have a long career ahead of me and he has a long career ahead of him. So I feel like there were a lot of things that just made sense.”
THE FUTURE
For Marks, one of his aspirations is changing what’s plausible for a race team.
When coming up with the name of Trackhouse Racing, he considered what “the next generation race team” will be like.
“It was never a goal of mine and never interesting to me to put my name on this race team,” Marks said. “Because we want to build a team that can transcend racing, we want to build a brand. We can do fun things in music and entertainment. We can really think outside of the box and build kind of a racing American lifestyle-type brand.”
Should initiatives like the Next Gen car work out and help in reducing costs, Marks observed “it’d be really good for the sport if owners were just people of note, in general. You know, Michael Jordan, an actor or a singer or some celebrity or something like that.”
Maybe Marks was calling his shot. On Jan. 15, less than two months after saying that, Trackhouse Racing announced a new co-owner: International rap star and Grammy award winner, Pitbull.
But before any of that can happen, before the success or failure of the Next Gen car determines the future of the sport, Trackhouse Racing has to get off the launching pad in Florida.
“I really want to get to Daytona in February and just be able to exhale,” Marks concluded. n