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Remember Shane van Gisbergen’s heart-stopping wins this season? The Trackhouse Racing driver set road courses on fire by clinching five NASCAR Cup Series victories. Yet no less electric was a MotoGP victory under the same team’s banner. On 20th October, Raul Fernandez brought the team’s first Grand Prix win in Australia, marking a sensational triumph in just its second year of operation. Now, team owner Justin Marks is putting his foot down. With that maiden victory last month, Trackhouse MotoGP became the 11th and final team on the current grid to win in the premier class. This sets it at par with teams like Honda HRC Castrol, Ducati Lenovo, and Yamaha MotoGP. So Justin Marks is hardly going to stop his brilliance, eyeing new avenues of expansion. ADVERTISEMENT An F1 collaboration for Trackhouse Racing? MotoGP is now owned by Liberty Media, which also owns Formula One. Justin Marks recently proposed linking the open-wheel racing series and the global motorcycle property. He said, “There is a lot of interest in investing and getting in and wanting to buy teams and all that. I think it’s entirely possible that we take a partner at some point along the way. But I remain bullish on the property, and the team values will increase over time; I think the sport’s popularity will increase over time. If Liberty can apply just a little bit of what they’ve done in Formula 1 to MotoGP, it’s got a bright future.” Investors are looking at MotoGP, and they include F1 heavyweights like Max Verstappen. The four-time F1 champion was exploring buying a team in MotoGP. And Trackhouse was one of the outfits his representatives had talked to. And with Raul Fernandez roping in the team’s first-ever victory at the Australian Grand Prix, the spotlight has increased. Marks continued, “There’s just people paying more attention or looking at us as a legitimate race team — as a real competitive satellite race team — and not just a team that’s sort of there.” Yet there are also concerns about how Trackhouse Racing is paying for the venture without a huge amount of sponsors in MotoGP. The 2025 campaign is still ongoing, with one grand prix left next weekend in Spain. Some people have wondered if Trackhouse’s lifespan in MotoGP may be limited. “It’s tough,” said Marks. “One of the things that’s tough about it is you can always spend more and more money on chasing speed and success that doesn’t fit into a box like stick-and-ball sports do with salary caps and all that kind of stuff.” ADVERTISEMENT So Justin Marks is focusing on conscious expenditure and mindful investments. “So what we have to be careful of is that we’re spending money on things that are the most effective in getting the results for the business as possible…There’s a lot of ways companies can spend money, and we just need to make sure as an industry that the price point of getting involved in NASCAR doesn’t outpace the value proposition.” ADVERTISEMENT Read Top Stories First From EssentiallySports Click here and check box next to EssentiallySports Trackhouse Racing is excelling across motorsports disciplines. Yet the team’s workload just ratcheted up with an unfortunate incident. A slump for the winner Shortly after celebrating his maiden victory, Raul Fernandez encountered a disaster. The Trackhouse Racing #25 crashed heavily on Friday last week at Portimao. Despite heading back out for practice and also finishing in P8 during Saturday morning’s FP2, Fernandez took no further part last weekend. He suffered a shoulder dislocation in the crash, which will require some time for healing. He missed the Portugal Grand Prix as a result, with his teammate, Ai Ogura, finishing seventh after passing Johann Zarco late on. ADVERTISEMENT Raul Fernandez addressed the MotoGP world feed broadcast on the grid at Portimao ahead of the Portuguese Grand Prix. He is focusing on the Valencian MotoGP next weekend. “It’s true that on Friday I had a very big crash and I felt super-bad with the shoulder because I had a [disclocation] on the shoulder. It means that the recovery is minimum of three or four days. Maybe to think to race here was possible, with a lot of pain, but we were thinking more on Valencia to try to be there to make the test on Tuesday, which will be very important. At the end, we were thinking about Valencia and about the Valencia test.” Evidently, Trackhouse Racing’s plate is full, as challenging tasks lie ahead for its MotoGP operations. We can only wait and see how Justin Marks’ multi-disciplinary team performs!
