Sunoco Rookie of the Year contender Daniel Suarez continued his impressive run in the NASCAR XFINITY Series with a fourth-place finish in Saturday night’s Drive for the Cure 300, tops among series regulars.
The top five was Suarez’s seventh in 29 starts for Joe Gibbs Racing this season, and it left him seventh in the series standings with four races left. Though Suarez is 128 points behind series leader Chris Buescher, he’s only 16 back of fifth-place Darrell Wallace Jr.
The top five points finishers earn places on the stage at the awards banquet at season’s end.
The next step for Suarez is a victory, but the 23-year-old Mexican driver has found the competition exponentially more difficult than in his previous series, the NASCAR Mexico Series and the NASCAR K&N Pro Series East and West.
“I’ve never had to work that hard to be running in the top 10, top five,” Suarez said after Saturday night’s race. “The difference between these, what I’m racing right now in the NASCAR XFINITY Series and the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series, versus what I was running in the last few years – NASCAR Mexico and NASCAR K&N and local racing in road course and open wheel stuff, the competition is so much more difficult here.
“When you have a good car, that’s not enough. You have to make the car as perfect as possible if you want to be a contender. That’s something that you can’t learn in all those series because the competition is not the same. One old friend told me that a perfect race car doesn’t exist, so you have to make it better every single time. I think that’s something that applies a lot in this series.”
Suarez has four races left this season—at Kansas, Texas, Phoenix and Homestead—in which to try to score his first victory.
“We just need to put all the luck together and our stuff together to try to win a race,” he said. “I feel like we’re close, and we have the speed. We just need to put our pieces together.”
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