Trackhouse Racing's Justin Marks reveals what he told Ross Chastain after Darlington

Ross Chastain let victory get away from him in the Goodyear 400 at Darlington Raceway on May 14 after taking both himself and Kyle Larson out of contention during the second-to-last restart.

Following another on-track incident involving his star driver, Trackhouse Racing co-owner Justin Marks said he would be “aggressively handling” some “things” Chastain needed to “clean up.” Darlington would be the start to the worst stretch of the season for Chastain, who despite maintaining his position in the top-five of the NASCAR Cup Series points standings, entered this past Sunday’s Ally 400 at Nashville Superspeedway winless.

Chastain got off the schneid at Nashville, winning his first race of the season to automatically qualify for the playoffs. Marks addressed the win afterwards, as well as the conversation between he and Chastain after the incident at Darlington.

🗣️ "I didn't tell him to calm down. I didn't tell him to settle down."@JustinMarksTH sets the record straight on the conversation he had with @RossChastain following Darlington several weeks ago.

💭 "I'm not an experienced team owner in this series. I'm learning as I go." pic.twitter.com/VVqY0Yw7ug

— SiriusXM NASCAR Radio (Ch. 90) (@SiriusXMNASCAR) June 27, 2023

“I didn’t tell him to calm down,” Marks said, via SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. “I didn’t tell him to settle down — I mean I think this whole conversation between us is a narrative that has sort of taken on a life of its own in the media. You know, I am going through this process with Ross, the same thing that he’s going through. I’m not an experienced team owner in this series. I’m learning as I go, and so we have conversations not as boss and employee or anything, but as friends — competitors and just as people together trying to figure out what this path is.

“The conversation that we had was ‘Look, we have an amazing opportunity here. We have incredible people at Trackhouse Racing putting race-winning speed cars underneath us, and let’s take advantage of that opportunity. Let’s not throw it away. So, Darlington was a tough weekend only because winning the throwback race at Darlington would have been an amazing thing for our company. So, we don’t wanna take those opportunities and throw them away. We worked through that together a little bit.”

Ross Chastain wins Ally 400 at Nashville Superspeedway, his first of the season

Chastain led 99 laps en route to winning his first Cup Series race since Talladega in April 2022. Relieved to finally race his No. 1 Chevrolet to victory lane, Chastain talked about overcoming his struggles from earlier in the season.

“This is incredible,” Chastain said after the race, via NASCAR.com. “This is why every little kid out there, anyone in the world when you get criticized, and you’re going to if you’re a competitor, they will try to tear you down, and you’ll start believing it, and you can’t do that.

“Go to your people. Trust in the process. Read your books and trust in the Big Man’s plan upstairs. And just keep getting up and going to work on it. A lot of self-reflection through all this, but I had a group that believed in me… They didn’t let me get down.”