Trackhouse Racing was once the dark horse of NASCAR. Back in 2022, the team only nearly missed out on the championship with Ross Chastain. So how does a team go from experiencing the glory of a championship-contending run to the dismal conditions it is facing today? According to Corey LaJoie, their condition has got something to do with Hendrick Motorsports and their relationship with Chevy.
Trackhouse Racing’s hidden advantage, which was stripped away
On the latest episode of the Stacking Pennies Podcast, Corey LaJoie explains why Trackhouse Racing is in such a pitiful condition even though they had a great start to their NASCAR operations.
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“Let me just explain to you the rise and fall of Trackhouse. When the next-gen car came in, the GM tech center wasn’t built yet. Trackhouse’s shop, which was Ganassi’s shop, was being built previously for three or four Cup teams. They were running two Cup teams.
“They had room to offer GM to work for their technical center out of Trackhouse for the first year and a half of this car before they had this building. So these underwing scanners, all the GM engineers were out of Trackhouse before they went now on Hendrick’s property. So when they came out of the gate, Ross came out like a damn bandit, right?”
LaJoie is talking about the legendary run that Ross Chastain had in 2022. At that point in time, Trackhouse Racing felt like a fresh breath of air again against the age-old dominance of the Big 3 of NASCAR. It is quite easy to understand why hosting GM operations in their own garage was a huge benefit for them.
In a sport run by three manufacturers alone, Trackhouse was hosting the biggest and most successful one of them. They could easily go over to the GM engineers for insight and understand the car better. Not only that, Trackhouse Racing could literally share the data with GM and use it to their advantage to improve their own garage. No wonder they were going so successfully with this partnership.
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Their dependence on GM is what ended up killing their advantage completely when the manufacturer shifted to Hendrick Motorsports’ grounds. “They get to use all the stuff, but now, it’s out of their shop. They can’t walk down the hallway and ask, ‘Hey, what are we running for the left bump today?’ They have to put it in front of a bureaucratic structure, which is GM shares everything. So they’ve lost their advantage.”
It is a massive hurdle for the team. However, it is a bigger hurdle for their rookie, Connor Zilisch. The star rookie of the 2026 season has yet to post a significant finish in any of the nine races so far. LaJoie believes that the inferiority of their equipment makes the learning curve so steep in his case. Zilisch is up against two veterans who are accustomed to winning races.
As such, both Chastain and SVG have no issues in keeping up with each other. On the other hand, Zilisch is yet to understand the nuances of his backmarker car. Hence, Connor Zilisch has to work harder than the other two drivers to get to their level.
Although as LaJoie explains further, he also sheds light on the other team that has been affected negatively by Hendrick Motorsports’ partnership with GM.
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Why is RCR facing a massive dip in performance?
It feels almost unimaginable to think that a team like RCR would face such a sorry situation today in the Cup Series. But there is another aspect to this story. One that explains their brutal performance drop from the 2022-2023 seasons to their current state in NASCAR. As LaJoie reveals,
“RCR, when they came out of the gate, were the ones that built the first next-gen car. Tyler Reddick was testing it at Darlington and testing it at Gateway; he came out of the gate and won three or four races for the first year in the eight car. Kyle Busch jumps in it, wins a couple races, and now everybody else has understood this car. They’ve surpassed them with what they’ve learned and what they do.”
It is the exact same story at Trackhouse Racing. Richard Childress and his team were able to build the first next-gen car and utilize the advantages of being a step ahead of the other teams. But as time went on and GM shifted their operations, their natural advantage was stripped away from them.
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It is for the same reason that RCR’s performance ended up going haywire. The tools and insights that they started with were no longer exclusive to them. At the end of the day, NASCAR is a sport that is changing at a rapid pace. It is easy to find a simple advantage that ends up putting your team ahead by a considerable margin.
However, what’s really difficult is to keep improving that margin and stay ahead while others progress around you in the sport. In this case, both Richard Childress Racing and Trackhouse Racing failed to do that.
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