Trackhouse Racing co-owner Justin Marks offers solution to COTA track limit penalties

“Qualifying is one thing. You’re trying to get everything out of it, and you’re just — you just push a little bit too hard. Racing is a little bit — I didn’t like the penalty on the No. 9 yesterday. It’s just, you know, like when you — sometimes, you’re in situations where you just, you almost can’t help it,” Marks said. “I mean, I think there’s a — I think that the reason that we’re at the track limits era is because of the way these new tracks are getting built. I mean, the way that they’re getting built is that, they’re trying to make them so safe. They’re trying to mitigate safety here. So we’ve got big run off zones. A lot of pavement, you know. They don’t want cars, you know, spinning out and hitting things. They want cars spinning out, putting in gear and rejoining the race. So a lot of the new tracks that have been built around the world have the track limits element to them. You don’t see it at the old classic F1 tracks. You don’t see it, really at any of the other road courses here in the US.

“One of the things that we do in Moto GP that I suggested to Elton Sawyer and Steve O’Donnell earlier today, is when a bike breaks the track limits rules, every track has a corner where there’s like an escape road, that runs a long way around the outside of that corner, and they call that a long lap penalty. So when you get called for track limits violation, on the next lap, you have to make a long lap. So in that corner, you have to go take that access road, and the penalties three or four seconds, and then you rejoin the race. Well at COTA, it happens to be that the only United States Moto GP race is at COTA, and in Turn 13, there’s a long lap escape road. So I I pulled it up on Google Earth, and I snapshotted it I sent it to O’Donnell and and elsewhere, and I said, ‘Just make it a long lap penalty,’ so it’s not a guy going from, from second to P27 on the last lap. He’s going from second to ninth. Still a penalty, but then the punishment fits the crime a little bit.”

Evidently, Justin Marks has taken it upon himself to try and fix the problem, and that’s a viable solution. If NASCAR decides to implement that rule moving forward, perhaps the racing at COTA will be more exciting when the Cup Series returns to Austin in 2025.