DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Winning a sports car racing endurance championship in its series debut season is a rare achievement for any racing team.
Winning two first-year endurance titles at the same time is almost unheard of, but that’s exactly what Pierce Marshall, his longtime coach and co-driver Eric Foss and Matador Motorsports accomplished in Historic Sportscar Racing competition.
“To be blunt, the only time I’m on track is a race weekend with HSR,” Marshall said. “My work schedule just doesn’t allow anything else. So, my approach to this whole thing is to get as much track time as I can at these events, and that’s the way to do it. I do the Michelin Prototype Challenge at every event, as well as run the Mission HSR Classics when they’ve got them. For me, racing is one of those things where I love my hobby, and I’m blessed to be in the position where I have my own race shop and that I can have a car like this.”
Driving the 2017 No. 02 Matador Motorsports Cadillac Dallara DPi, Marshall and Foss won both the HSR Classic Endurance Championship presented by Mission Foods Modern Prototype/Sports Racer championship as well as the season-long endurance title in the top-tier P1 class that was added to the HSR Prototype Challenge presented by Michelin championship this year.
“I would not have had these championships without Eric Foss, who has been with me since I first started racing,” Marshall said. “His coaching and driving have brought me to where I am, and obviously Dan Binks and Binks Motorsports prepare an incredible car for us. The reason I think we consistently had such good performance is that the car was great right off the trailer. There is just no substitute for that. We were able to just get in and go fast right from the very beginning without chasing anything, and that’s honestly key.”
Matador’s season highlight was undoubtedly the HSR Classic Endurance Championship by Mission Foods in which Marshall, Foss and the No. 02 Matador team won two of the year’s four races. In an “odd” occurrence, the team won the opening Round 1 of the season at the HSR Classic Sebring 12 Hour presented by Mission Foods in March and took its second win in Round 3 at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta in September at the inaugural HSR Classic Road Atlanta 10 Hour presented by Mission Foods.
The victories were backed up by a second-place finish at the HSR Classic Watkins Glen 6 Hour presented by Mission Foods and a third-place showing at the season-ending HSR Classic Daytona 24 Hour presented by Mission Foods, which was enough to secure the 2025 title.
Marshall and Foss have been a winning partnership for more than a decade.
“I was fortunate enough to meet Pierce at the end of 2012, so 13 years ago almost to the day probably, and we started working together,” Foss said. He didn’t have much racing experience back then, but I had a lot of GT experience, and over the years we have really progressed through his race craft.
“When we got to the Prototype stuff I told him, ‘You know, I have no experience in these types of cars,’ but he put a lot of faith in me and said, ‘well, we will learn this together.’ So, it’s been an awesome journey of his learning through me, and me also learning the cars themselves. It just makes it a lot of fun and I’m very grateful how he puts as much faith and trust in me as he does. In return, he is always a pleasure to coach and is really, really honing his race craft and his improvement, especially over the last few years. It has been pretty awesome.”
Marshall, Foss and the No. 02 Matador squad were the only team in the HSR Classic Endurance Modern Prototype division to finish on the podium in every race this year.
“It’s great that HSR and Mission Foods and Juan Gonzalez came up with this concept to make a championship out of these HSR Classic endurance races,” Marshall said. “I would argue they are the toughest ones to win, especially consistently.”
