Trackhouse showed up in 2022 in NASCAR, and everyone looked slow in contrast. They figured out the Next Gen car faster than teams that had been around for decades. Ross Chastain nearly won the championship. The wins kept piling up, seven of them just last year. Nobody was complaining then.

Fourteen races into 2026, the same team has six combined top-10s across three cars. Chastain is 40 points below the playoff bubble. The garage is talking. Justin Marks has been hearing it.

“There’s an interesting narrative around us because we came out so strong in 2022,” Marks said. “Even last year, it was like, ‘What’s wrong with Trackhouse?’ And we won, like, seven races last year.”

He is not brushing off the 2026 version of that question. But he is putting it where it belongs.

“This sport is difficult, and it’s cyclical. A lot of these teams are learning how to maximize things on these race cars that they didn’t know how to do in ’22 and ’23.”

Here is what the NASCAR numbers actually say. Chastain has told reporters he cannot see the second pace car when he rolls off the grid on Saturdays, which is how far back they are qualifying. At Nashville, a track where he has won before, two of their three cars were done before the first stage ended. This is not a rough patch. The car is just slow.

Part of it is structural. When the Next Gen car launched, Trackhouse cracked the setup faster than anyone. That early advantage is gone. Hendrick and the Toyota teams have spent four years stacking data on top of data. The gap they have built is now Trackhouse’s problem to solve.

Chevrolet is not helping. The new 2026 Camaro ZL1 body was supposed to close the gap with Toyota. Instead, it opened a new one. The wind tunnel numbers have not matched what actually happens on track. Every Chevy team is struggling, but Trackhouse feels it hardest. They run ECR engines, not Hendrick’s in-house units. Kyle Larson, William Byron, and Chase Elliott are the only Chevys consistently running up front.

The driver lineup in NASCAR makes it worse. Connor Zilisch is a rookie sitting 33rd in points, still working out ovals. Shane van Gisbergen is in the same boat. That leaves Chastain feeding nearly all the oval data back to the engineers alone. Marks pointed straight at it.

“Looking at that No. 1 car, Ross has won on road courses and on ovals. He’s had the longest tenure here. And he’s sitting 22nd or 23rd in the playoff standings. That’s just not where we need to be.”

One Win Changes Nothing, and Everything in NASCAR

SVG has eight Cup wins. All eight came on road or street courses. That ties him with Tony Stewart for second on the all-time list, behind only Jeff Gordon’s nine.

Sonoma was the latest one. The car was rough all weekend, poor practice, qualified sixth, and the crew worked through the night to fix it. Sunday, SVG led 74 of 110 laps. Chase Briscoe was right on his bumper at the final hairpin, close enough to touch. SVG held the inside and won by 0.357 seconds.

He had also swept Saturday’s O’Reilly Auto Parts Series race the day before in a JR Motorsports entry. The win moved SVG to 14th in points, sitting 36 above the cutline. For one weekend, the team exhaled.

Marks is not reading too much into it.

“If you look at our tools, our people, our sponsorship, our funding, we need to be a solid playoff team every year. That’s the standard we need to hit. And right now, we’re not hitting it.”