Daniel Suárez did not come from a racing family or dynasty. His father had a shop in Monterrey, Mexico, where he fixed up old cars. When Suárez was about 10 years old, a family friend told him to ride in a go-kart.
This happened in 2003. When Suárez was 14 or 15, his father asked him if he wanted to play for a professional team. “I told him that I was already a race car driver for a living,” Suárez says. “He laughed and told me, ‘Well, if you’re good enough, you could do this for a living.’ He then began to explain what that meant.”
Now that Suárez is 30, he knows that day was a turning point. He didn’t know any professional race car drivers and didn’t know how racing could be a job. He had no doubt that he was good. Suárez says, “I was the kid everyone came to for advice.” “My dad was aware of that. My dad knew that I was different.”
Suárez’s father told him to go to the U.S., where he became NASCAR’s first foreign-born national champion in the Xfinity Series in 2016 and its first Mexican-born race winner in the top-level Cup Series this past June. Before that, Suárez was a young man who didn’t speak English and raced against a sea of American drivers who had been racing each other since they were kids.
“All my friends with whom I raced go-karts are in Mexico,” says Suárez. “I was all alone. A few of my friends could speak Spanish, but that was about it. At times, it felt a little lonely, but I try to think of that as part of the process.
Suárez started racing in the NASCAR Cup Series in 2017 and had a hard time at first. At first, he drove Toyotas for Joe Gibbs Racing. In 2018, he got his first pole position at Pocono, but he never won. In 2019, he switched to Stewart-Haas and Ford, but he still didn’t win any races. Then he spent the 2020 season with the Gaunt Brothers team, which didn’t have much money. In those four years and almost 150 Cup races, he only finished in the top five eight times.
“That process was hard for a lot of reasons, some of which are long stories,” Suárez says.
Then, in 2021, he moved to Trackhouse Racing, a new team owned by former driver Justin Marks and pop star Pitbull. Suárez was a great fit for Trackhouse and its Chevy Camaro.
“They gave me the chance to put together a team around myself,” Suárez says. “They were very encouraging and really wanted me to do well. I’m not saying that my previous teams didn’t support me or want me to do well. I’m just saying that they did it in a different way. Trackhouse is not very old. This place is cool. Trackhouse has a driver from Mexico and an owner from Latin America.”
At Sonoma Raceway this year, Suárez won his first Cup race. He said he didn’t think about how long it took for a driver born in Mexico to finally win, or what that said about the series he races in, which is mostly white. He just thought that the first victory would be the start of many more.
Suárez says, “I try to worry about things I can handle.” “I can’t change the past, but I can change what will happen in the future. I hope this encourages more Latino drivers to join NASCAR and shows them that there are many jobs for them in the sport, not just as drivers but also as mechanics, crew chiefs, engineers, pit crew members, and so on.
Suárez says that the best way to get a group of people interested in NASCAR is to make them feel at home, just like he does for his Latino fans and they do for him. He wants NASCAR to hold more international races in the next ten years while he makes history.
Suárez says, “In my mind, I haven’t done anything yet.” “I still have a lot to learn, but every day I get better. It took longer than I thought it would, but every driver has a different way of doing things. I always say that the highest point of one mountain is the lowest point of the next. There’s still a long way to go for me.”
