Ross Chastain Admits Trackhouse Is Struggling Bad Heading Into NASCAR’s Break

Jarrod Partridge|July 31, 2026|

"That's the great thing about competing at this level, it's really, really hard, and we're not the only ones struggling, but we are struggling bad right now, and we know it."

Ross Chastain said that out loud, on the record, about his own race team. Not a rival trolling him, not a fan on social media. The driver who smashed a watermelon in victory lane at Charlotte just over a year ago, delivering Trackhouse Racing its first crown-jewel win, is now sitting 21st in the Cup Series standings with no wins in 2026, and he isn't hiding from it. NASCAR's Cup Series is off this week, a rare mid-season breather before the playoff push resumes at Iowa on August 9, and for Chastain that pause arrives with his season teetering on the edge of relevance.

From Watermelon Fields to Victory Lane

Chastain grew up on a 400-acre watermelon farm in Alva, Florida, a town of fewer than 3,000 people east of Fort Myers, in a family that has grown watermelons across eight generations. His days off from school went to the fields with his father, Ralph, mowing rows of rye grass planted to keep sand from scarring the melons. "Watermelons have put food on our table, money in our pocket and created our livelihood in the Chastain family for a long time," he has said. He wanted to farm, like his dad, his granddad and his uncle before him. Racing came later, at age 12, almost by accident, and it grew into more than 50 wins on short tracks before he ever reached NASCAR's national series.

That upbringing is why the watermelon smash became his signature. Every trip to victory lane ends the same way: Chastain hoists a melon over his head and brings it down, agriculture on national television, a nod to the fields that raised him. He has only gotten to do it a handful of times at the Cup level, most memorably last May at Charlotte, when he won the Coca-Cola 600 and delivered car owner Justin Marks and Trackhouse their first win in one of NASCAR's four crown-jewel events.

A Season Without Answers

Fourteen months later, that win looks like it belongs to a different team. Chastain missed the playoffs entirely in 2024 and set out this year to reverse Trackhouse's fortunes. Instead, the slide has continued. Through the bulk of the 2026 season, he has posted only one top-5 finish and four top-10s, with a stretch of four straight finishes of 26th or worse hitting him hard in the middle of the season. He sits roughly 40 points back of the cutoff for a playoff spot with a handful of regular-season races left to close the gap.

What separates this slump from an ordinary bad year is how openly Chastain has talked about it. "We're inundated in meetings and trying to grasp which direction we need to go, because we just don't know," he said of the search for speed inside the Trackhouse shop. Asked to summarize where the No. 1 team stands in the field, he didn't reach for a hopeful spin: "I think 20th in points is a really good yardstick for where we are. We've had days where we're 17th, we've had days where we're 23rd. We're not playoff-capable right now, but we're working to get there."

He has pointed some of the blame inward too, breaking his own performance down to the smallest details rather than only pointing at the car. "I just need to first focus on the entry of the corner, in my opinion, and get into the corner better, and then we'll slowly step through it," he said, describing a race at Kansas where he couldn't carry speed into the braking zone the way he needed to. It's the kind of granular self-assessment that comes from a driver still convinced the answers are found, not manufactured, the same patience that used to get him through a farm season when the weather didn't cooperate.

The Team That Rose Overnight, Now Sliding Just as Fast

Trackhouse itself is a young organization, and its rise mirrors Chastain's own arrival at the front of the field. Justin Marks founded the team in 2020, fielded a single car for Daniel Suarez in 2021, then bought Chip Ganassi Racing's entire Cup Series operation, shop and charters included, midway through that year. Chastain joined for the 2022 season to drive the No. 1 Chevrolet, and the pairing worked almost immediately. He won twice that year, made the Championship 4 in just Trackhouse's second full season fielding him, and finished a career-high second in the final standings. It was a rise nobody in the garage saw coming from a team that hadn't existed two years earlier.

That history is exactly why 2026 stings. A team built on outrunning expectations is now explaining why it can't find speed at all, and a driver who once turned Trackhouse into a championship contender within a season is now the one being asked, race after race, when the answers are coming.

The Bubble Chastain Cannot Afford to Miss

NASCAR's playoff math is unforgiving. Sixteen drivers make the postseason field, and with the regular season winding down, every points-paying finish now carries outsized stakes for a driver on the outside looking in. Chastain has been here before. After winning at Charlotte in May 2025, he looked like a team on the rise, a driver who had already authored one of the sport's most replayed moments, the wall-riding "Hail Melon" pass at Martinsville in 2022 that vaulted Trackhouse into the championship four in just its second full season. That run built him a reputation as a driver capable of finding speed nobody else could see.

This year has offered little of that magic. The week off before Iowa gives Trackhouse a chance to regroup, but it also means four more race weekends of pressure once the series returns, then Richmond and New Hampshire before a regular-season finale at Daytona sets the 16-driver playoff field for a ten-week title run. Denny Hamlin, meanwhile, is already locked into the playoffs and sitting on top of the points, a reminder of just how far back Chastain and Trackhouse have fallen from the sport's front rank.

A Driver Who Still Talks Like a Farmer

Chastain's public accounting of this season isn't panic. It's the same plainspoken tone he uses to describe a rough patch on the farm: acknowledge the problem, break it into pieces, keep working it. "That's the great thing about competing at this level, it's really, really hard," he said, a line that could just as easily describe a bad watermelon crop as a winless summer. He has not stopped believing the team can climb back into contention, only stopped pretending the climb is going to be easy.

Iowa is a short track, the kind of racing Chastain cut his teeth on long before Cup Series stardom, and if there's a place for Trackhouse to find the speed it has been missing, drivers around the garage say a bullring is as good a bet as any on the schedule. Short tracks reward exactly the kind of car control Chastain built his name on as a teenager, wheeling anything with four tires and an engine around Florida bullrings on nights and weekends between farm chores, long before anyone in the Cup garage knew his name.

Whether that background is enough to close a 40-point gap in a handful of races is another question. For now, Chastain has done the harder thing first: told the truth about where his team stands, without waiting for a reporter to point it out for him. A driver raised to read a field and adjust to whatever the season throws at him is applying the same instinct to a struggling race team, one honest answer at a time.

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Jarrod Partridge

Founder of Motorsport Reports, Ayrton's dad, Bali United fan, retired sports photographer. I live in Bali and drink much more Vanilla Coke than a grown man should.

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