Ross Chastain Ready to Take Trackhouse to Championship
Halfway through the 2022 season, Chastain was all smiles as he had a pair of wins and sat 2nd in the championship standings. After some run ins with rival drivers, he tailed off late in the regular season. Coming into the playoffs, not many people were giving the Trackhouse Racing driver any chance to even get out of the first round.
The opening round did not start off well for Chastain, but a 7th at Kansas and 6th at Bristol were enough to safely advance him into the next round. It nearly came to a disastrous end at the Charlotte Roval, but he squeaked his way into this final round.
His 2nd place finishes at Las Vegas and Homestead are more reflective of the driver that we saw earlier in the year. His aggressive driving style have him poised to make his way to the championship next weekend in Phoenix. Chastain enters this weekend with a 19-point cushion, with two drivers guaranteed to advance based on points.
He has not won since April, but Chastain leads the series in top-fives (13) and top-tens (19) this season. Martinsville was a track for him earlier this season when he scored one of those top-five finishes. Still, Ross is not quite experienced enough to know how to feel ahead of Sunday's race.
"I don't know what it's supposed to feel like. I've never been here. For Trackhouse, we're learning all this together. We're experiencing this together. We've got a lot of knowledge in our shop and I'll lean on a lot of teammates, but I'm a racer. We're just going to race. We'll go practice as well as we can, we'll go qualify as best we can."
That will be a key element for every playoff driver this weekend, as passing has proven to be difficult in the NextGen car on short tracks this season. If Ross can just keep it clean and avoid mayhem on Sunday, he should continue the underdog story all the way to championship weekend.
"I feel like that no matter what, this season is going to be a success, but in the moments where I hit the wall at the Roval and I realized this could all be gone and we could not transfer, it hurts, and I don't want that. I feel confident in our Trackhouse group and what we'll have at Martinsville. We just continue to arrive on the scene of the Cup Series, and I wouldn't want to be doing it with anybody else."
