Daniel Suarez not resting on laurels after Atlanta win

HAMPTON, Ga. — Daniel Suarez indicated to team owner Justin Marks that Sunday wouldn’t be the last time they would see each other in victory lane.

“This is just the beginning,” he said.

For someone who had just won his second career Cup race in his 253rd start, that would seem a little bold. For a driver who has won two races while the Trackhouse Racing organization has won five with two other drivers over the last two-plus years, it would seem a little bold.

For a driver who some believe is fighting for his job, that could seem a little overconfident.

But that is typical Daniel Suarez, who always has carried himself that he has the talent to race — and beat –—NASCAR’s elite, whether he truly believed it or not. To hear him talk, he should be running as well as teammate Ross Chastain, who has vied for the title the last two years.

The win Sunday at Atlanta Motor Speedway might just be the catalyst Suarez needed to vault him into the Cup playoff conversation and on the path that he plans to travel to become a Cup championship contender. Time will tell, but the Daniel Suarez today has a different resume than the one who started the race at Atlanta.

He now has an oval win (his first career win came 58 races earlier on the road course at Sonoma). He now owns a win in one of the closest finishes in NASCAR history as he made a move on the final lap that lunged him just 0.003 seconds ahead of Ryan Blaney and Kyle Busch at the finish line. He should have two playoff appearances by the time the season is over.

“Some people actually told me earlier, ‘And now you can relax, you’re in the playoffs?'” Suarez said. “Hell no.

“My goal is not to win one race. I want to head to the playoffs with at least a few wins to be able to contend for a championship. This is not relaxing here. This is only the beginning. We have to continue to work, continue to build.”

The win at least should go a long way for Suarez to keep his ride. Team owner Justin Marks said it is a contract year for Suarez.

It is clear Marks has a soft spot for the 32-year-old Mexican driver, who was the fourth employee Marks hired when forming the team.

Marks has three drivers signed who are potential Cup drivers at Trackhouse in the next three years: Zane Smith, who is on loan this year as a Cup rookie to Spire; Shane Van Gisbergen, the three-time Supercars champion who won his Cup debut on the Chicago street course last year and is racing in Xfinity for Kaulig Racing this season; and 17-year-old phenom Connor Zilisch, who will run a variety of series this year.

“You could look at what we have right now, and you can look at the drivers that we’ve signed, but you don’t know what we’re working on behind the scenes,” Marks said.

“Yes, this is a contract year for Daniel. Does that mean that this is Daniel’s audition? No. It means that basically we are working on growing this company and making Trackhouse one of the powerhouse perennial championship-contending companies in this sport.”

Suarez told FOX Sports in January that no matter the drivers that Trackhouse signs, he has pressure on him.

“I feel like I’ve got to perform every year regardless if it’s a contract year or not or regardless if they’re hiring new drivers or not,” Suarez said. “Performance is something that is a must regardless of everything that happens outside the race track.”

It is that quest for performance that resulted in Marks making the decision to replace Travis Mack as crew chief for Suarez after a winless 2023 where they didn’t make the playoffs.

Trackhouse hired crew chief Matt Swiderski from Kaulig Racing in hopes that the change would make a difference.

“I didn’t really know Daniel too well before then, so I didn’t know what I was getting into,” Swiderski said. “But after spending time, I’m definitely pleased where I ended up.”

So now where do they go from here? Suarez, the 2016 Xfinity Series champion, finally checked the box of winning on an oval in the Cup Series, and with 23 of the 26 regular-season races on ovals, he’s going to have to win more on ovals than road courses in order to reach his goals.

“This was a really tough race tonight,” Marks said. “We had 12 or 13 leaders, 25-plus lead changes. He had to make really good moves at the right point to be able to lead and put yourself in position to race like this.

“So at this specific type of race for him to win, I think it really is great for his confidence because he’s closed the deal.”

It gives him the confidence that what the team is doing to build him and his team into a championship contender is headed in the right direction.

“The goal for me personally, it has never been to win a race a year or win two races a year,” Sarez said. “The goal is bigger than that.

“And I knew that to be able to get that, we needed to do something, and I feel that right now we’re slowly making steps in the direction of what I want to be, where I want to go with this with this race team.”

Suarez has never shied from the goals no matter how difficult the road he has traveled to reach those goals.

“It’s very difficult for me to actually lose trust in myself and to actually lose everything that I know,” Suarez said. “But it is a little bit. When you don’t win races for a year, year-and-a half, you start losing a little bit of confidence.

“It’s like, OK, what do I have to do? I know I can drive. What do I have to do? What else do I need to do? You have to keep grinding.”

So one thing is for sure — if the victory did anything, it just made Suarez even more confident in himself and his No. 99 team.

“The goal for me and the 99 is for you guys not to be surprised when the 99 is in victory lane,” Suarez said.

That will take a while. Suarez knows that changing the narrative takes time.

He will enjoy the journey as he always has.

“I love this pressure,” Suarez said. “I love going out there knowing we have to perform. I use that as fuel.”

Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including over 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass.

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