For the 99 team, winning the Ambetter Health 400 was huge, as they had not won a race for over a year. Any NASCAR enthusiast would know that winning a race in the Cup Series is a hard nut to crack. But interestingly, that’s not the most difficult part. What’s harder is to maintain that winning momentum and carry it forward throughout the weeks to come until Championship 4 in November. And that’s exactly what Kevin Harvick expects of Daniel Suarez, the driver of the #99 Chevy.
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38 weeks of racing means 38 weeks of tireless preparation. Needless to say, it often becomes difficult to keep at it throughout the season. But that’s how you become a champion! Harvick said in an interview with NASCAR on FOX, “It’s when you figure out, just as William Byron has done; when you figure out how you can win four, five, six races in a year by taking that momentum and continuing that progression and work and everything that you did to get back into victory lane.”
Harvick admitted that the first conversation that he had with his team after winning the 2014 Cup Championship was how Jimmie Johnson had then managed to accumulate multiple championships. Surely, it lies in the approach of the 7X Cup champ towards his game. The former Stewart-Haas Racing driver admitted that he wants to see Suarez and the entire #99 team continue that winning approach for multiple weeks and turn 2024 into a multi-win season. They are in the playoffs for sure, but the job just gets tougher from here.
“It’s the sacrifice week after week after week. Don’t hold anything back on your preparation; it has to be the same week after week after week. That’s also for the team, that’s also for the pit crew to do that, but to do that for 38 weeks of the year, it’s hard. That’s what I wanna see out of the 99 team next,” he added.
Team owner Justin Marks shuts down rumor about Suarez’s uncertain future with Trackhouse Racing
Until his recent victory, the Mexican driver had just one victory to his credit. Moreover, 2023 wasn’t a good season for him as he was able to register merely three top-5 and 10 top-10 finishes. Naturally, many might have thought that 2024 was going to be a contract year and anything beyond that was uncertain. But team owner Justin Marks confirmed that he had never considered letting Suarez go anywhere.
“I don’t envision, necessarily, a situation where Daniel is not a driver for Trackhouse Racing,” Marks exclaimed. “There’s a lot of things going on behind the scenes, and this is why we made a change at crew chief. This is why we made a change with some of the people around him and the processes to put him in a position where he can win.”
Suarez’s 0.003-second victory is a testament to how hard the team had been working during the off-season. There were several changes in the team, one of which was Matt Swiderski replacing Travis Mack as Suarez’s crew chief. And certainly, all of that seems to have paid off.
