Ross Chastain has his own unique way of celebrating a NASCAR victory: where the unusual tradition comes from, Pete Fink explains in his guest column
It’s the big eye-catcher of the 2022 NASCAR season: A guy wins a Cup race, climbs through the hatch onto the roof of the car, is handed a watermelon – and then smashes it on the asphalt before gleefully chewing on the remains during the winner’s interview.
Healthy fruit instead of fat burgers. The whole thing in the infield of a NASCAR speedway, of all places, where it normally smells more like the smoke from the thousands of American barbecue fans.
Who does that? We’re talking about 29-year-old Ross Chastain from Florida. His family runs a large watermelon farm there, which explains his nickname “Watermelon Man” – and, of course, his victory celebrations.
The NASCAR scene has already been able to experience this victory procedure, which is as unusual as it is rich in vitamins, twice in 2022: At the end of March at COTA, the Circuit of the Americas in Texas, and again just four weeks later at Talladega Superspeedway.
The bottom line is that with his two victories, Watermelon Man Chastain is bomb-proof for the 2022 NASCAR Playoffs – and that’s without a doubt the biggest surprise of the still-young Cup season.
The Just Do It Farm in Punta Gorda
Not only, but mainly because Chastain’s racing story is a story with very few straights. Instead, there are all the more bends, detours and near dead ends.
Actually, a career on the family farm in Punta Gorda was in the cards for the not-so-whole-youngster from Florida. There, the Chastains are already the eighth (!) generation to grow watermelons. If you remove the focus on melons, the Chastain clan is already the twelfth generation in the farming business.
“But it was my uncle and my father who took the farm far,” Chastain told us after his COTA win. By the way, the Chastain farm is officially called the JDI farm, very loosely based on the legendary Nike motto: “Just Do It”.
So dad Ralph and brother Chad take turns with the race visits, because one of them always has to stay at home with the five permanent employees. Why? “When the cat’s away, the mice do the dance,” grins Ross Chastain.
And once there are a few free NASCAR days, the reverse is true. Then even the two-time race winner has to get to work in the fields at home: Planting, watering, harvesting. There is always something to do in the country.
The big hobby of farmer-dad Ralph was racing and that’s why son Ross was also allowed to try his hand as a junior driver. He did so well that he won more than 50 races at local level and therefore tried his luck in Charlotte from 2011 – as an 18-year-old.
Of course, Charlotte is still the epicentre in the big NASCAR business, but without potent sponsors in tow, Ross Chastain struggled mightily for many years.
Ganassi and the FBI
Once and again there were (part-time) stints in NASCAR trucks and in the second division. There, however, mostly with the back-bench teams who were very happy to take a sponsor dollar or two, for example from the Watermelon Farmers Association.
Long story short: the farmer scion toiled away for seven long NASCAR years without achieving any sensible results.
It wasn’t until early summer 2018 that the long-awaited breakthrough seemed to come when he was hired by Chip Ganassi for their second division Xfinity team. Chastain promptly delivered: pole position in the first Ganassi entry and the first win in the second race.
Everything was going well until the next major setback: The US FBI became aware of Ganassi’s main sponsor DC Solar, who was promptly proven to have set up a Ponzi scheme fraud.
The court case involved well over 100 million embezzled US dollars, which put DC Solar founder Jeffrey Carpoff behind bars for 30 years, cost Chip Ganassi his Xfinity team – and Chastain his NASCAR job.
Again the Watermelon Man had to deal with a major setback, again he landed only part-time jobs in the grey midfield of NASCAR leagues two and three.
From Ganassi to Trackhouse
But one thing he hadn’t lost was his will to win. Against all odds, he led the Niece team to three wins this season in NASCAR Trucks in 2019 and actually made it to the Final Four. At the end of the 2019 season, even the runner-up championship jumped out, with Chastain only narrowly defeated by truck veteran Matt Crafton.
And one person still believed in him: Chip Ganassi. Because when the Ganassi team needed a successor for Kyle Larson in NASCAR League One for the 2021 season, the Watermelon Man was chosen. Was that the final breakthrough?
No. Not again. Because what nobody could have guessed at the start of the 2021 season: In the summer of 2021, Chip Ganassi sold its NASCAR organisation to the new trackhouse team around owner Justin Marks. There, the Mexican Daniel Suarez was already set as the first trackhouse driver. Who would get the second cockpit? For Chastain, the next nail-biter began.
It wasn’t until August 2021 that it became clear: the Watermelon Man would be allowed to keep his Cup cockpit, even his old Ganassi crew was completely taken over.
The new trackhouse owners Justin Marks and rapper Pitbull (by the way, one of the biggest trackhouse sponsors is Kid Rock with his Kid Rock’s Big Honky Tonk & Steakhouse in Nashville) thus relied on the continuity factor – and Ross Chastain is now paying them back.
Perhaps the only fly in the ointment: the original watermelon that the Watermelon Man took from home at the start of the season in February 2022 has, of course, since rotted. Even in his first victory at COTA, at the end of March, the shattered winning watermelon came from an ordinary supermarket.
So, significantly, it was once again Chip Ganassi who was one of the very first Twitter graters after Chastain’s Talladega win: “I like winners,” Ganassi tweeted.
Burritos instead of watermelons?
And it only took a few minutes for his teammate Suarez to offer his Twitter congratulations as well, to which Chastain promptly replied, “Don’t worry bro, you’re next!”
Sounds like an eminently sensible to-do list at Trackhouse: Chastain is already safely in the NASCAR playoffs, now it’s Suarez’s turn, who for his part already had two fourth-place finishes in 2022.
For indeed, with NASCAR’s new next-gen, nothing is the same in the 2022 season. If you will, there are no more long-established top teams, at least not for now.
This is of course nothing but a great opportunity for youngsters like Tyler Reddick, Chase Briscoe or Suarez and Chastain.
Whatever else may come in 2022, one thing is certain: in terms of victory celebrations, the Watermelon Man is certainly the legitimate NASCAR successor to Carl Edwards, whose backflips caused such a stir for many years.
In this respect, the only question that remains is: What actually happens when his Mexican trackhouse teammate Daniel Suarez wins for the first time? Will there be a round of burritos instead of watermelons in Victory Lane?