YORK HAVEN, Pa. – Brent Marks senses he’s on the threshold, if not already in the early stages, of the prime of his racing career.
He didn’t say that word for word, but one can read between the lines and put the pieces together. On Sunday at BAPS Motor Speedway, Marks picked up his sixth win of the year and third in the last eight days. Before this year, his most wins in a single season was six in 2014.
Now, he’s equaled that number in just two months, ever since he brought back his No. 19 family car at Port Royal Speedway on April 24.
Marks’ rise in production makes sense. He turns 31 in December, and it is widely viewed throughout motorsports that a driver enters their preeminent years sometime in their 30s.
“I think so,” Marks said in a phone interview earlier this week as to whether he thinks a driver comes into form in their 30s. “I know you have to be a very mature driver to be successful in sprint car racing, especially at the World of Outlaws [NOS Energy Drink Sprint Car Series] level. If you want to be a champion, you have to have that maturity.”
“A lot of that comes with age and experience,” he continued. “I could see why everybody says when you get to your mid-30s it’s kind of when you start seeing drivers hit their prime. A lot of that is just because they are getting to an age where they obviously get more mature, but also the experience.”
Seat time is obviously important. But experience means more than just on-track happenings, too. It’s experience on how to deal with situations: how to manage the good and navigate the bad. Experience on how to deal with people, in a team setting, often gets overlooked as well.
Marks has only run for two teams full-time throughout his sprint car career: his family and CJB Motorsports. From 2010-’16, Marks laid the groundwork of his family operation before hitting the road with the World of Outlaws for three years, starting at age 27 in 2017.
He won just four times in that three-year span, highlighted by a Williams Grove National Open win in 2019 before pulling off the tour at the end of ‘19. That took him to an important 2020 campaign with CJB Motorsports. There, Marks freshened his perspective, spent more time at home with his family, worked with experienced crew chief Barry Jackson, and focused on purely racing.
“It allowed me to sit down and reevaluate some different things and think about some stuff,” Marks said. “I got a little bit of a different feel driving [for CJB Motorsports] and feel like I grew in that little over a year period as a driver.”
CJB Motorsports and Marks parted at the tail-end of April. At that point, the driver nicknamed the “Myerstown Missile” was ready to apply the wisdom and maturity he gained along the way in his second stint running the family team.
“When I got back to my car, I sat down and reevaluated some things,” Marks said. “I figured this would be a perfect opportunity, one I’ve always wanted to try. I never really pulled the trigger or had enough guts to do it, whatever you want to say. I just felt right now was a really good time to do that.”
He’s not only pulled the trigger, he’s been shot out of a cannon. Marks topped a stacked field with the World of Outlaws at Ohio’s Eldora Speedway in May and blew open his Pennsylvania Sprint Car Speedweek series lead to 101 points with seven races to go.
“All we have to do is keep doing what we’re doing,” Marks said.