Trackhouse Racing owner Justin Marks is pushing back against a popular narrative. He does not believe his driver, Shane van Gisbergen, intentionally wrecked Austin Hill at Chicagoland last Sunday. The controversial clash came two weeks after a massive wreck in San Diego. The Richard Childress Racing driver caused that crash, which directly collected SVG. It ended the road course maestro’s hopes of an easy win.

That was the building block for the narrative that was built at Chicagoland. On lap 48, SVG bumped into the left rear of Hill’s No. 33 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet entering Turn 3, spinning him into the outside wall. RCR owner Richard Childress was convinced that it was “payback for California,” as he said on Hill’s team radio.

But Justin Marks completely dismissed that storyline during a recent appearance on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.

“When I got on the plane to fly back to the race shop, I sat with Shane for a few minutes, and I’m telling you he was like, ‘I hated that it happened,'” Marks said. “He was like, ‘I did not expect that to happen.’ It’s one of these things: if you saw with Zane (Smith) and the 77 (Carson Hocevar), fighting for the bottom, it was pretty line-dependent getting into the corner. He shot to the bottom, and it’s just two people fighting over a piece of real estate. It’s just funny in our sport that it a lot of times involves the same people, and it creates this like narrative.”

Marks also highlighted the strong business relationship Trackhouse shares with RCR as part of the Chevrolet family.

“We’re key partners with Richard Childress Racing,” Marks added. “We work with RCR, we work with Hendrick. The drivers all get together; they don’t see each other on Sundays on the racetrack. These guys work together during the week. They provide the feedback to Chevy during the week. So there are all these engagement points where they get together, and they have to talk about it and have to figure it out.”

This season, Chevrolet and Ford are both struggling to match Toyota’s supreme pace. In such a phase, such infighting could only spell disaster for the OEM. He believes SVG is smart enough to know the consequences of an intra-team rivalry.

“So I think at the end of the day, nobody really, if you’re smart, nobody wants to engage in a rivalry that jeopardizes the company and all the sponsors. And all the people that build racecars at the racetrack,” Marks explained. “I think that these guys know that. Certainly, Shane knows that. I don’t know Austin, but certainly Shane knows that.”

Marks also cleared the simplest building block behind the entire ‘payback’ narrative. For SVG to take revenge on Austin Hill, there would have needed to be an intentional wreck from the latter to warrant revenge. But Hill caused the San Diego wreck simply because he locked up his brakes going into Turn 1 while fighting Connor Zilisch for the lead.

NASCAR didn’t penalize either driver for the incident. But they have been called for a meeting at EchoPark Speedway in Atlanta on Saturday to avoid any boiling over of tensions.