'We just haven't kept up with the competition' - Chastain

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.

“Then we evolved it and came out of the gate in 2022 fast and should have won a lot more … I feel like if I could do those races over, I could have won even more than the two. We just found speed .”

Chastain described the start of 2025 as a roller coaster. He’s 13th in the championship standings, but his finishes have been up and down the leaderboard, which he acknowledged needs to be smoothed out. Along the way, the team has seen different tracks, speed, balance, and handling issues.

As someone who’s experienced highs and lows in his career, Chastain doesn’t find it harder to go through this performance period after having tasted Cup Series success. He remains confident his team can get back to doing what they need to on a weekly basis.

“I think if I had made some better decisions throughout the race at Las Vegas and we had equal tires — we had old right-side tires at the end of the race — you put that together with a few setup changes if we knew then what we know now,” Chastain said. “I thought was a good example of racing for the win. We were right behind him. Martinsville, if you plug us in on the front row for the lead, I think there’s a group of us there that could have won the race. The 11 was super strong at the end, and he drove away, but second through 12th .

“The pace car almost got me . It about caught up to me. It’s week to week. That’s two years in a row that Homestead stands out as our terrible performance, and I can’t make speed, and I’m hitting the wall. But you back up to 2022, and we ran second, so it’s like, how do we run 30th after running second a couple of years ago? It’s a head-scratcher.”