Let's get straight down to it: could Max Verstappen be driving in the NASCAR Cup Series at San Diego next month?

The answer, in any sensible world, is 'no'. He doesn't have NASCAR experience, it's the middle of the F1 season, and the race is only a month and a half away. And yet...

Justin Marks gave some pretty strong hints on Sunday evening that Trackhouse Racing's Project 91 could get dusted off for the first time since the Daytona 500 last year, the part-time entry intended to give international drivers a sense of NASCAR racing.

Asked if he was planning on bringing any new names over, with San Diego rumors floating, Marks said simply: “I would say – I say don’t forget about Project 91. That’s all I’ll say right now.”

Verstappen's fellow F1 champion Kimi Raikkonen was the first man to take the wheel, driving at Watkins Glen and COTA in 2022 and '23 respectively, before P91 gave Shane van Gisbergen his first taste of the Cup Series in Chicago in '23. Van Gisbergen is now a full-time Cup driver for Trackhouse, and took his seventh win (the most of any foreign-born driver) on Sunday.

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Trackhouse Racing and Max Verstappen: The connections

The Van Gisbergen connection is especially notable for Verstappen, who admitted at the time he'd 'never been so nervous' than watching his friend go for the win in Chicago, saying that he was up late and screaming at his screen toward the end of the race.

The pair still have a close connection, with the New Zealander calling up his fellow Red Bull athlete last year for advice about driving the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez in Mexico City (the advice took – he won the first ever Cup Series race in Mexico that weekend).

Of course, SVG isn't the only Red Bull athlete on Trackhouse's books, with young Connor Zilisch – a former karting rival of F1 stars Kimi Antonelli and Arvid Lindblad – showing up to hang out with Verstappen at the Miami Grand Prix at the start of the month. It was to Zilisch, infamously, that Verstappen admitted last year that he'd like to try a Cup Series car.

Would Verstappen be allowed to race in NASCAR?

As bizarre as it sounds, there may not be any concrete factors ruling the four-time F1 champion out of a one-off run at San Diego.

While it is the middle of the F1 season, there's no race on San Diego weekend – with a week off between Barcelona and Austria for the F1 circus. That creates a gap.

Would his team stop him racing in another series? Well, they haven't so far. Verstappen's raced multiple times in GT3 cars at the Nurburgring in F1 off-weeks in the last year, at a decidedly more dangerous course (and driver set) than San Diego and NASCAR.

There's been some chatter that the Red Bull F1 team's links with Ford could prevent Verstappen running in a Trackhouse Chevrolet in NASCAR, but that appears to be spurious guesswork – after all, there are Ford teams running in his GT3 races while he drives a Mercedes, the manufacturer of one of his F1 team's great rivals.

Will Max Verstappen race in NASCAR at Coronado Naval Base in six weeks time? Even with everything laid out above, it would be a massive surprise. Most likely he'll bide his time, and Marks has someone else tentatively lined up for Project 91 before the F1 great steps in, if he ever does.

But is it impossible? Absolutely not. There is a chance, however unlikely, that one of the best drivers in the world comes to play in the NASCAR Cup Series this summer. And that would be very, very cool.

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