The ex-F1 driver taking on NASCAR with a new team

Jacques Villeneuve hit the headlines in February by qualifying for NASCAR’s biggest race, the Daytona 500, aged 50. And he’s not the only driver from the 1996 Formula 1 rookie crop to have set his sights on a successful crossover to the Cup Series this year, although the 1997 world champion’s career bears little resemblance to that of Tarso Marques beyond the 24 times they shared a grand prix grid. True to his career to date, the Brazilian’s NASCAR bow will be with an underdog outfit in Cup newcomer Team Stange, whose owners had originally targeted a move into IndyCar…

The story starts with a supercar that 46-year-old Marques, who ceased racing in the Brazilian Stock Car championship after the 2018 season to focus on his burgeoning custom car and motorcycle company, built with the aim of creating the ultimate trackday weapon. Capable of up to 1200 horsepower, according to Marques, the TMC M1 attracted interest from investors in the United States and contact was made via occasional ARCA team entrant John Stange. They had first crossed paths at Long Beach in 2004, when Marques was racing in Champ Car for Dale Coyne, and Stange had brought Yoke TV sponsorship to the minnow squad.

Conversation soon turned to Stange’s ambition of creating his own IndyCar team, having partnered in an Arrow Schmidt Peterson Motorsports Indianapolis 500 entry that Oriol Servia drove to 22nd in 2019, and Marques was sounded out about helping the outfit get up to speed with some test work. When he agreed, things then developed rapidly and Stange’s investors pushed for Marques to commit to the project as its driver – despite his insistence that younger and better funded alternatives would be more suited to the project’s ambitions.

Marques freely admits that he had previously “declined many opportunities” to continue racing, as it “was not my priority anymore”, but was finally persuaded for what at this point was still a planned IndyCar assault.

“We started to talk in November I think,” Marques recalls. “I said, ‘John, you can have thousands of drivers, 20 years old, new stars that can bring a lot of money for your team. I’m not racing’. And he said, ‘No, we don’t want that, we want you’ and they kept pushing for two or three weeks. By the beginning of December, we were working on the contract.”

Stange previously partnered with Schmidt Peterson Motorsports on 2019 Indy 500 entry for Servia

Photo by: Geoffrey M. Miller / Motorsport Images

But, after pen had been put to paper, the team hit a wall on engine supply deals and the idea of racing in NASCAR formulated. The Chicago-based Ford squad – bucking the unwritten rule that NASCAR outfits are headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina – will enter eight races on the 2022 Cup schedule, beginning with Road America on 3 July. Afterwards, Marques will tackle the Indianapolis Road Course, Watkins Glen, Daytona, the Charlotte Roval, Las Vegas, Homestead and the Phoenix Championship Race. All were selected by Stange’s main backer, blockchain company Dignity Gold.

Having raced single-seaters, touring cars and GTs – taking a best finish of fourth in three FIA GT outings in 2004 – Marques is enthused by the prospect of taking on the good ’ol boys in one of the few series he has yet to sample.

“I raced everything in my life, NASCAR is the only thing I didn’t drive yet and I always wanted at least once just to see how it was,” he says. “For the driver, the races are amazing because it’s so competitive and that should be huge fun. I think it will be cool, I’m really looking forward to that.”

"The cars are so close, the teams are there for a lifetime already and most of the drivers too. That’s why we’re going to do only eight races this year, first of all because we have to build the cars and because we need time" Tarso Marques

But Marques is under no illusion that he faces a huge challenge, since what is effectively a start-up team as a non-charter entry will have to qualify for events.

“We’re going to have a hard season in front of us,” he admits. “NASCAR is 10 times harder [than IndyCar], especially to qualify. The cars are so close, the teams are there for a lifetime already and most of the drivers too. That’s why we’re going to do only eight races this year, first of all because we have to build the cars and because we need time.

“We are not in shape as a team to be racing the normal programme of NASCAR because they run almost every weekend. We need to do a race and then we need two or three weeks to see what we did wrong, what we need to adjust to try and improve a little more for the next race and to be prepared for maybe a better season next year. But we have the knowledge that we have hard work in front of us.”

Marques insists that he’s not making his comeback in NASCAR to prove a point to anybody, and says he’s “doing it for myself”.

Marques is excited by the challenge of racing in NASCAR and emulating fellow 1996 F1 rookie Jacques Villeneuve (27), who qualified for the Daytona 500 with Team Hezeberg

Photo by: Jasen Vinlove / NKP / Motorsport Images

“I don’t really care for what people say, people that say bad things about me, it’s guys that don’t really know me or don’t know the situation,” he remarks. “It’s not fair to judge a driver if you don’t know the conditions that almost no one knows, just people inside the team know what’s going on.”

The occasion of Villeneuve’s last grand prix podium at Hockenheim in 2001 – a third place for BAR in a race of attrition – provides a snapshot of Marques’s challenging F1 stint that comprised three separate spells at Minardi in 1996, 1997 and 2001, none for a full season. A leaking refuelling valve on team-mate Fernando Alonso’s car caused a fire prior to the start and the Spaniard was switched to the spare, only for Marques’s car to suffer the same fate. He was given Alonso’s bodged race car that used different pedal and seating configurations.

Trying to cram himself into a car set up for Alonso’s 5cm shorter frame was, Marques recalls, “a nightmare”, although he was spared further punishment when the gearbox packed up on lap 26. It sums up a season spent driving a chassis that might be called a parts-bin special, only built up in the garage before its first race in Melbourne, although Marques did muster two ninth-place finishes that would be worth points under today’s system.

“My car and Alonso’s car were completely different,” he says of the first PS01 chassis that was deliberately built on the conservative side of the weight scale to pass its crash test. “Heavier, different brand of brakes, less power, everything because they just did not have the money. With my car, I was sometimes three tenths, sometimes almost a second slower.”

Throttle problems meant he failed to qualify within 107% of the pole time at Silverstone and was prevented from starting. Marques reckons the aged Cosworth engines, badged as Europeans in deference to owner Paul Stoddart’s aviation business, were already 150 horsepower down on the top cars even when working properly.

“Then [at Silverstone] I had only 75% when I go full throttle, so we had almost 300 horsepower less,” he says.“How can I do like a 107% time of the pole position? People said, ‘The guy couldn’t even qualify’, which is ridiculous, but I couldn’t say anything.”

Marques’s career is one of promise unfulfilled - often through circumstances not of his making. Aged 19, he dominated the 1995 Estoril Formula 3000 race from pole, and had previously taken pole at Pau – only to collide dramatically with DAMS team-mate Guillaume Gomez shortly after the start. He acquitted himself well in his two F1 starts for Minardi in Brazil and Argentina in 1996 but had to wait more than 14 months for his next chance when Jarno Trulli was signed by Prost to replace the injured Olivier Panis.

Marques dominated the 1995 Estoril F3000 race from pole, but couldn't replicate that success in middling to tail-end F1 equipment

Photo by: Sutton Images

Marques says he had originally been slated to partner Ukyo Katayama but refused to sign a management deal presented by Trulli’s minder and team co-owner Flavio Briatore. He was demoted to a test role and considers it a turning point in his career.

“If I had signed with Briatore, I’m pretty sure I would end up winning races and maybe a championship, because all the drivers he signed got the chance to drive for a big team,” Marques says.

However, the Hart-powered M197 wasn’t much to shout about, a litany of mechanical woes reflecting the team’s limited finances. The engine let go five laps into his return at Magny-Cours, the transmission failed on the grid at Hockenheim and brake problems were a confidence-sapping regular occurrence. The nadir came in Austria, where Marques was disqualified after qualifying due to running 3kg underweight, which the team put down to not compensating with ballast for weight lost by the driver since his last FIA weigh-in.

"The whole package was wrong the year I did the races for Penske. The following year they changed the chassis, engine and tyres and it was amazing, they won everything. The team was great, but just the wrong package at that time" Tarso Marques

Left on the sidelines in 1998 as Minardi favoured the well-backed Shinji Nakano and teenager Esteban Tuero, he engaged former McLaren bigwig Creighton Brown as a manager and was hired by Team Penske in 1999 to replace the injured Al Unser Jr on its single-car Indycar team. But it wasn’t the dominant force of today and was at the time experiencing its longest-ever winless streak.

PLUS: How Penske ended its longest drought

“I was in the right place at the wrong time,” he says.

John Travis’s “beautiful” PC27B was mated to a Mercedes engine that lacked the punch of Honda and Ford, and mounted on Goodyear tyres that were inferior to Firestone’s products. Part of a revolving cast of drivers for the team that year along with Alex Barron and Gonzalo Rodriguez, while the team also flitted between its bespoke chassis and a customer Lola, Marques completed four more races after two outings subbing for Unser but only managed a single top 10 finish at Rio.

“The whole package was wrong the year I did the races for Penske,” he says. “The following year they changed the chassis, engine and tyres and it was amazing, they won everything. The team was great, but just the wrong package at that time.”

Marques at the wheel of the Penske PC27B, the final car produced in-house by the storied team in 1999

Photo by: Motorsport Images

As the lone Swift runner in 2000 with Dale Coyne Racing, Marques was always fighting an uphill battle. That his most significant impact on a race came at Michigan when, already four laps down, he unwittingly towed Juan Pablo Montoya past Michael Andretti on the line speaks volumes for the unpopular car’s competitive prospects. Later spells at Coyne in 2004 and 2005 were similarly fruitless, but Marques believes drawing on these hardships will help Team Stange in 2022 as it attempts to become established in the Cup Series.

While realistic, he doesn’t lack belief and is committed to the ambitious team for the long haul. It has announced a scheme to blood international drivers in NASCAR development series, with FIA F3 race winner Matteo Nannini its first confirmed driver for a partial programme in ARCA, and is fielding F3000 race winner Ricardo Sperafico in the Brazil-based GT Sprint Race championship (run by Marques’s brother Thiago) as Dignity Gold seeks to grow its South American presence. His role, then, amounts to much more than merely a driver.

“I think probably this experience that I have of those hard times is one of the strongest reasons that they pushed so hard to have me,” Marques says. “When I got to Formula 1, I didn’t have a chance to drive a competitive car and neither in Indycar. All the teams that I went to weren’t in a good condition at the time, so we were not competitive. I’m used to that, unfortunately!

“I will stick with Team Stange no matter what the condition, even if I have the offer to go to the best team. If we suffer to qualify, I will keep with them, working hard because I was retired and they trusted me to help me to develop the team. We have a long-term deal and my intention is to stay and work with them.”

Marques believes his experiences of tough times will make him an asset that can help Team Stange on its Cup Series learning curve

Photo by: Clive Rose / Motorsport Images