In its short time within NASCAR, the Trackhouse Racing outfit has seen quite a lot of success on the race track. This goes both for their regular team and their coveted Project 91 team. Following Shane Van Gisbergen’s win at the inaugural Chicago street race, many fans are wondering, what is exactly Project 91?
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Around last year, team owner Justin Marks appeared on the Dale JR Download and explained this very same question. Out of all of the teams in NASCAR, Trackhouse Racing is the only team that has invested in such an interesting program, and with the Chicago win, it seems to be playing out well for the overall team.
Justin Marks explained Trackhouse Racing’s Project 91
When Junior asked Marks about Project 91, the Trackhouse Racing boss explained how with the Next-Gen cars it had become a little easier for drivers from other forms of motorsports to drive these things. Therefore, this era kind of created the space for something that Marks had been waiting to create for a long time.
During the podcast, he explained, “Now that the window is open for us to really attract world-class notoriety globally relevant talent to the sport and be able to put a good effort where they feel like they can compete. But NASCAR is like, the rest of the world looks at NASCAR like we look at V8 eight supercars. We look at some of these competitions parts will be like, ‘Oh, that’s really cool. That’s unique. That’s different…'”
“NASCAR is this quintessential American thing, on these ovals, doesn’t exist anywhere else. So that moves the needle for people like, Daniel Ricciardo and some of these guys like they want to come do this thing. They want to, they want to try it but with the old cars, this was too difficult. So Project 91 is about building a division in the company that is set up to be the landing spot in NASCAR, for people of that stature that want to come try it.”
Shane Van Gisbergen wins at the historic Chicago Street Race with Project 91
Before the Supercars champion got to drive the Project 91 Chevy, there was another driver that graced the wheel behind this unique concept. The driver in question was Kimi Raikkonen, the retired Formula 1 driver. However, after a couple of races with Raikkonen behind the wheel, the team decided to bring in someone new to the project.
The inaugural street race at Chicago proved to be the perfect place to debut Shane Van Gisbergen. It ended up playing out well for the Project 91 team after he cruised past Justin Haley in the final laps of the race and won his first-ever NASCAR race. Following the race and the victory burnouts, the Kiwi told the press, “This was so cool. This is what you dream of. Hopefully, I can come and do more.”
When asked about his intentions for future races, he revealed that he planned to spend one more year in Australia. Following that, Gisbergen expressed his eagerness to participate in races here, suggesting he would be open to accepting a full-time drive. Well, after his impressive performance at Chicago, surely there will be some or the other team looking forward to signing him up in the future.
