Trackhouse Racing regular Daniel Suarez has not had the best start to the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series season. The #99 Chevrolet driver only managed a P13 result during the season-opening Daytona 500, which remains the highlight of this year so far.
Advertisement
The following three events saw the Mexican retire from two races and finish in P23 in the last one. Such performances from the sole Hispanic driver on the field are in contrast to how things kicked off for Trackhouse Racing as a team as the Next Gen era kicked off in 2022.
Coupled with a degradation in terms of overall speed from the Trackhouse stable, the influx of new talent such as Connor Zilisch has also raised concerns about whether Suarez will remain in NASCAR after all.
The 33-year-old touched on the same topic earlier in the year as drivers prepared to start the season at Daytona International Speedway back in February.
“It not only depends on me. Yes, I’m a very important factor of it. But we have to continue to get better as a group. I think Trackhouse does an amazing job with Project 91, getting this driver young, do all these different things,” he said.
“At the end of the day, I’m only worried about myself. I’m worried about how can I bring myself to have the best opportunity to win multiple races a year. That’s my main goal,” added Suarez, giving an insight into his mindset during the season.
Choosing to filter out the noise that has surrounded him ever since Zilisch’s fiery perfromances in the junior categories of stock car racing, Suarez might be able to take some relief from the fact that the young driver’s Cup Series debut at the Circuit of the Americas did not go very well, with the latter crashing out of the same.
This pinpoints the amount of grit needed to race in NASCAR’s top tier, along with how being at the right place at the right time matters. Zilisch was an innocent victim when another car spun in front of him at COTA. He could not avoid the spinning car and thus planted himself in the wall after making contact.
Daniel Suarez admits “cloudy” contract situation last year
Despite batting away any questions about his confidence in his ability to stay in the sport this year, Suarez also came clean on how it was not the case in 2024. Last year was the start of the Connor Zilisch hype train in the sport.
Coupled with Suarez’s results from last year, despite clinching one victory, the Monterrey, Mexico native accepted how there were doubts about his future in the sport, especially with his current team.
“I would say a year ago right now, it was a little cloudy. We didn’t really know where we were going. In the off-season, we really made a lot of progress to what I think heading into the direction that we believe is the best,” he admitted.
“We see how things play out. But yeah, I hope that we are heading in the right direction,” he summed up, looking ahead to the remainder of the 2025 season, which has incidentally just started to pick up pace.
