Suárez replaces Haley at Spire Motorsports: New NASCAR challenge

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Daniel Suárez, the only Mexican driver in NASCAR’s top category, has been announced as the replacement for Justin Haley at Spire Motorsports. Suárez, who was the first driver hired by Trackhouse Racing in 2021, will be replaced after five seasons by 19-year-old Connor Zilisch next year.

This combination gives Suárez and the No. 7 Chevrolet team the opportunity to prove that both are capable of being weekly contenders.

Jeff Dickerson, Spire Co-Owner

Suárez hasn’t won any races this year and missed the 16-driver playoffs, while Haley has the No. 7 car ranked 31st in the Cup Series standings with only two top-10 finishes. Haley achieved the only Cup victory in Spire’s history with a win at Daytona International Speedway in the July 2019 race.

I think we need each other. I think we all like a good redemption story and giving people a platform to prove the skeptics wrong. Daniel needs to prove to everyone that this year was an outlier, and we want to prove to everyone that the performance of car 7 this year was also an outlier.

Jeff Dickerson, Co-owner of Spire

Suárez won his two Cup Series race wins with Trackhouse and finished 10th, a career best, in the standings in 2022. Spire will be the fifth team in 10 years for the 2016 Xfinity Series champion. This year, he ranks 28th with two top-five finishes and seven top-10 finishes. Suárez mentioned that Dickerson was one of the first people he called when he found out he no longer had a job at Trackhouse. Dan Towriss, the CEO of TWG Motorsports, became the majority owner of Spire this year, as the NASCAR team was added to a racing portfolio that also owns the Cadillac F1 team that will launch next season, as well as Andretti Global in IndyCar.

If you look at the last three years in terms of the growth of Spire Motorsports, I mentioned it to Jeff, three years ago, he probably wasn’t considering Spire Motorsports as an option. Right now, I think this is the fastest growing team in NASCAR, and I want to be a part of that. I know they’re not even close to being done. They’re just getting started.

Daniel Suárez

Spire has three Cup cars: Michael McDowell is 21st in points, Carson Hocevar 23rd, and Haley. But the team has three poles, six top-fives, 16 top-10s, and led 233 laps, all season highs for an organization that only began competing in 2019. Freeway Insurance, an insurance broker and distributor, will be Suárez’s main sponsor. Suárez will now be under the same umbrella as his Mexican compatriot Sergio Pérez, who will join Valtteri Bottas as the first two Cadillac drivers. Suárez and Pérez usually have significant sponsorship from Mexican entities, but Dickerson said they were not a package for TWG.

There was no decree. We are a sales-based organization, right? And so it’s like, ‘OK, if Checo is in the F1 car, then, you know, we have an opportunity here to really tap into a passionate fanbase’, and things come together. But you don’t know that’s how it’s going to be, right?

Jeff Dickerson, Co-owner of Spire

We dragged this out a bit, because we’re just waiting and waiting for some spark with Justin, and you finally get to a place where you think, ‘Man, I don’t know if we’re doing him any good, and I don’t think we’re doing ourselves any good.’ By that point, Checo had already been announced.