This trailblazer is turning NASCAR on its head with a successful, fresh approach to racing, sports, and entertainment.

Justin Marks and Trackhouse Racing are changing the way NASCAR works at a fundamental level. Not so much on track or in the tech shed, but certainly in the way that NASCAR functions as a channel for media and promotion. It’s right there in the company’s official name, “Trackhouse Entertainment Group.” The racing team is just one property of the company, and its mission is to “marry the cultures of music and motorsports.” The team’s tagline is, “Trackhouse is a sports and entertainment brand rooted in racing, bringing a fresh approach to NASCAR, sports, and entertainment.” 

The organization is committed to its branding. The Trackhouse Racing team is partnered with “Pitbull,” AKA Armando Christian Pérez, a Grammy-winning international recording artist who has sold more than 25 million studio albums and 100 million singles. Instead of the usual sponsor liveries, Trackhouse cars have turned up at Cup races advertising Pitbull’s new album, also named Trackhouse. The team is also involved in a series of SLAM (sports leadership and management) charter schools that Pitbull founded to bring tuition-free academic excellence to underserved communities.

Another of the team’s efforts is called Project91. The project was designed to expand NASCAR’s international reach by putting world-class drivers from other racing series into Cup races. The team entered former F1 driver Kimi Räikkönen in two races, and in July, Shane van Gisbergen drove the entry to conquer the streets of Chicago in the inaugural NASCAR Cup event. 

The man behind the concept and the team is Justin Marks. Marks is himself a NASCAR veteran with a 2016 Xfinity Series win to his name, as well as a successful two-decade career in sports car racing with Trans Am and IMSA. In addition to his role as a NASCAR team owner, Marks has continued to drive, most recently winning a Trans-Am race at Road America in July. 

As an owner, his teams have won three championships and claimed more than 30 career wins in the World of Outlaws series. A recent addition to the racing business mix is Trackhouse Motorplex, the go-kart racing facility previously known as GoPro Motorplex, in Mooresville, North Carolina.

We caught up with Marks recently to ask him about his unconventional approach and what it means for the future of NASCAR and racing in general. 

PRI: What makes Trackhouse Racing different from other teams?

Marks: Trackhouse is in the fortunate position of not having any legacy departments in the company or in anything we do. We were able to efficiently engineer this team from the ground up for the Next Gen era of the sport. That continued through the acquisition of Chip Ganassi Racing. We basically just took a real deep audit and said, “The world didn’t exist before the Next Gen car hit the race track.” We make sure that everybody in the company is contributing valuable work every single day that is trackable and accountable, and we know exactly how it makes the ship go forward, and this is where we ended up.

A big part of it is that we have a relationship with Chevrolet as one of their three key partner teams. Chevrolet invested a ton of money in their technology center. They’ve got huge engineering and data depth over there, and the results come to us through a communications pipeline, so we don’t have to procure that intellectual property in-house. There are other teams that also have that opportunity, but they do want to keep those programs in-house. We have to be as lean and as efficient as possible because we are wholly dependent on partnerships and sponsorships to make this go. It all creates a “one team” mentality where we’re just very efficient and good and effective at the work that we do. So just about every week we show up, we’ve just got very fast race cars.

PRI: Your team goes out of its way to promote community involvement among your team members. How do you think that benefits your organization?

Marks: Being stewards of the community and engaging ourselves as much as possible in “greater good” activities has always been very important. Internally to the company, it provides perspective. And we don’t get sucked into this bubble of NASCAR where you get so hyper-focused on your competition that you lose sight of the fact that what we’re doing is something that we’re very, very lucky to do. I think we should appreciate and see where the work that we do at NASCAR fits into the bigger picture of the American experience. So our crew is empowered to go out into the community.

They’ve got a lot of programs that they do that are really special and fun. We’ve done a lot of work with Pitbull’s SLAM schools in Florida. We’ve done speaker series, and our partner CommScope has done STEM events. We just go out and try to contribute to making the world around us a little bit better of a place. We’re not the only team doing that by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s an important thing to do psychologically for us as people. And it’s what every business in America needs to do. Whether you’re donating a hundred million dollars to some initiative or you’re giving away free sandwiches at the local shelter, it doesn’t matter. Everybody’s got to do something.

PRI: Your partner Pitbull is a celebrity in his own right, not related to racing, and you pulled him into the sport. Do you think other race teams can and should attract outside celebrities and VIPs into their teams?

Marks: I think that they should, but I also think that there’s a right way to do it and a wrong way. It was important for me when Trackhouse started that we had somebody amplifying who we were out to the world in a bigger way than we could, but that it was authentic. Some of the early conversations were very transactional, and it was brand ambassadorship, and I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to just have someone fake their interest in the team to get paid. I think that’s the wrong way to do it. It doesn’t stick with people.

Armando (Pitbull) was introduced to us through somebody that we both knew. We told him, “This is who we are, this is what we’re trying to do.” Then we flew down and sat with him in Florida, and we found that our values and our missions in life were so well aligned that we just wanted to go through this adventure together. He’s been very engaged and out in front of it promoting the brand. He’s been doing a lot for us and for our partners. So it works very authentically. That’s something that I hope will continue and will unlock some doors for other teams to start thinking about that. But it has to be authentic. It’s got to be somebody who understands the sport, who really actually understands the sport and sees the value in the partnership for both sides. It has to be someone who will get out in front of it and engage with the team in a very real way.

PRI: With your association with Pitbull and your drivers and everything else, you’re speaking to a younger demographic than traditional NASCAR and especially IMSA. What are you doing to bring in that younger and more diverse fan base?

Marks: Well, it certainly helps that we’ve got a guy like Pitbull who has a wide demographic of fans. He gets to take our message out to the world. Being focused on the youth is important because it helps build a strong future. I think it’s important for the sport, and I think it’s important for any consumer-facing business that wants to build longevity. 

We are a young team, and we allow everybody to be young and enthusiastic and to learn and be authentic. I’m 42 years old, and I look at the sport and look at the world, and I want to challenge the way everything is done. Being able to do that in a sport that has traditionally had team owners who are much later in their life gives me an opportunity to attract younger fans. 

We certainly don’t want to alienate anybody, but that attitude resonates with our partners. We have almost all of our race sponsorship inventory for the next two years already sold. A big part of that is because they want to be a part of the next new thing.

PRI: Tell me about Project91. What is it and why people should care about it?

Marks: I have noticed over the years that there’s a lot of international interest in the NASCAR Cup series because it’s unique and high-quality racing. I think a lot of drivers from around the world view NASCAR as a bucket list item. But there’s been nothing set up in the sport to really welcome them in, or a framework of a program that’s catered specifically to drivers from different disciplines. It was typically just one-offs to roll an extra car out. Project91 is specifically geared to very high quality, talented race car drivers that come from very different disciplines.

We provide training programs, familiarization tests, time with Chevrolet and in the simulator, all baked into this one program. We can then build commercial viability around this for our partners. From a promotional and marketing standpoint, I wanted to brand it independently from Trackhouse. We plan to build some brand DNA to attract partners. I like that instead of just being a third car, it’s something completely independent that stands on its own. 

PRI: What’s the source of the Project91 name? 

Marks: 91 is the car number, and it encompasses our two other numbers. Calling it Project91 was inspired by some of the secret government projects of the 1960s and 1970s. We wanted a cool, experimental, groundbreaking, disruptive type of name. Like it’s a special experimental project about trying to attract the great drivers of the world and put them into NASCAR to see what happens.

PRI: It looks like you’re really trying to take NASCAR international. Is that something that’s important to you and to NASCAR? 

Marks: Everything that we do at Trackhouse is to be good stewards of the sport and trying to help get the sport in front of new people. There’s certainly an element of altruism behind that. For us, it’s just seizing opportunity that nobody else is seizing. Ultimately, it has to work from a business standpoint, but we’re just doing something that needs to be done in the sport. 

PRI: Your driver Ross Chastain made that famous move in Martinsville, and it was attributed to video game practice. Do you think that more drivers are going to say they made a move because they practiced it on the simulator?

Marks: Everybody tried that move on a video game, but it takes a pretty rare personality profile to commit and do it in real life! I think that’s more Ross’s personality to commit that deeply to something. But the bigger answer around simulation is that it is absolutely going to play a bigger role in driver development because the physics engines [programs in the simulators] are getting so good that you can race and learn any time of any day at any age. 

I think you’re also going to start seeing younger and younger Cup-ready stars. It’s truly amazing because when I was coming up at 17 or 18 years old, I felt very far away from the NASCAR Cup series level. But nowadays we have 16- and 17-year-olds who look like they’re on a path to be Cup-ready in two years. The tools that the young people have to develop their racecraft and be prepared are more effective and deeper than they’ve ever been. 

PRI: Do you think there’s a happy medium between drivers being safe for corporate sponsorship while also allowing their individuality to be at the forefront?

Marks: That’s 100% where the balance needs to be found. The fact is, there’s just not very much money distributed to the teams in NASCAR, so we’re dependent on corporate sponsorships. I think it’s gotten to a point where people are afraid of being controversial. They’re afraid of saying the wrong thing. Drivers don’t want to put themselves out to the world as personalities because of that fear. But there’s a balance there because sponsors also love somebody who passionately talks about how hard they’re trying to win these races, because ultimately it reflects the stories that brands are trying to tell.

PRI: Do you think NASCAR is better now than it was 10 years ago?

Marks: I think that NASCAR is better in the sense that the level of competition has never been better than it is today. There are more teams that can win on any given Sunday today in NASCAR than at any time in the history of the sport. And that’s good. 

PRI: If you could make one or more changes to improve NASCAR or IMSA, what would they be?

Marks: I would be making massive investments in the star power of the drivers. I think we’ve got the competition nailed. We’ve got the locations nailed. We’ve got great television partners. But you know, I grew up idolizing these larger-than-life personalities like Dale Earnhardt, Tony Stewart, Jeff Gordon, and so on. I just see a lot less promotion of our drivers by the league these days than when I was growing up. These guys need to be larger-than-life aspirational heroes. I think that’s where there’s a huge opportunity for the league to invest capital, for the television partners to invest capital, and frankly for a lot of the sponsors of these cars to do what they did for a long time. They would run national advertising campaigns around their driver. I think that’s the next big step for growth in NASCAR.