CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Daniel Suárez, the only Mexican driver in NASCAR’s top category, has been announced this Wednesday as the replacement for Justin Haley at Spire Motorsports. Suárez, who was the first driver hired by Trackhouse Racing when it was founded in 2021, will be replaced after five seasons by 19-year-old Connor Zilisch next year.
Suárez hasn’t won any races this year and failed to qualify for the 16-driver playoffs, while Haley has the No. 7 car in 31st place in the Cup Series standings with only two top-10 finishes. Haley achieved the only victory in Spire’s history in the Cup, with a win at the Daytona International Speedway in the July 2019 race.The union gives Suárez and the No. 7 Chevrolet team the opportunity to show that both are capable of being weekly contenders.
Jeff Dickerson, Co-owner of Spire
Suárez won his two Cup Series victories with Trackhouse and finished 10th, a career best, in the 2022 standings. Spire will be the fifth team in 10 years for the 2016 Xfinity Series champion. This year he ranks 28th in the standings with two top-five finishes and seven top-10 finishes. Suárez stated that Dickerson was one of the first people he called when he found out he didn’t have 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.When we get to the point, I think we need each other. I think we all love good redemption stories 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
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 driver colleague 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.If you look at the last three years in how Spire Motorsports has grown, 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
There was no decree. We’re a sales-based organization, right? And so it’s like, ‘OK, if Checo is in the F1 car, then, you know, we have the opportunity 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 were just hoping and waiting for some spark with Justin, and you finally get to a place where you say, ‘Man, I don’t know if we’re doing him any good, and I don’t think we’re doing ourselves any good either.’ By that time, Checo had already been announced.
