Daniel Suarez has made his plans for the 2027 NASCAR season.
The winner of the Coca-Cola 600 this season will return to Spire Motorsports and continue to pilot the No. 7 Chevrolet in the NASCAR Cup Series, he announced this week.
For Suarez, one of 16 drivers to make the postseason Chase, the news comes amidst arguably his best season ever at the top-level of NASCAR. Suarez is posting a career-best 15.2 average finish this year and has seven top-10 finishes.
The 34-year-old native of Monterrey, Mexico broke into NASCAR via the Drive For Diversity program after winning 10 races across three seasons in the NASCAR Mexico Series. He joined Joe Gibbs Racing in 2015 for a full-time ride in the second-tier O’Reilly Auto Parts Series and won the championship
in his second season. He is the only international driver to win the championship in that series.
Suarez also ran Truck Series races for Kyle Busch Motorsports – taking the checkered flag in 2016 at Phoenix – and considered the late two-time Cup Series champion to be a friend and mentor. Suarez’s win this season at the Coca-Cola 600 in May was the first race held after Busch’s shocking death at the age of 41.
During Suarez’s first full-time season in the O’Reilly Series, Busch would call him once a week to offer advice, tips and more, helping the driver adapt to a different style of racing in a new country.
"I think about how fortunate I was not just to have him as a friend, but also as a mentor and as a competitor, and how much he actually made me better," Suarez said earlier this year. "He definitely left us way way too soon, but legends live forever. You know, he's the kind of guy that he will never leave for real. We're gonna be thinking about him forever."
Suarez made the jump to the top-level Cup Series in 2017. He has been with Joe Gibbs Racing, Stewart-Haas, Gaunt Brothers, Trackhouse and now Spire. When he won at Sonoma in 2022, he became the first Mexican driver to win in the Cup Series. Suarez also notched a victory in 2024 at Atlanta, besting Busch and Ryan Blaney in a three-wide photo finish in what is the fourth-closest finish in NASCAR history with the trio of cars separated by just 0.007 seconds.
In all, Suarez has eight combined victories across NASCAR’s top three national touring circuits.
Spire Motorsports fields three full-time cars in the Cup Series, with hard-driving Carson Hocevar and veteran Michael McDowell as Suarez’s teammates. Next season, they will bring back one of NASCAR’s 75 Greatest Drivers, Kasey Kahne, to race in the Truck Series. The organization is currently locked into a lawsuit battle with Joe Gibbs Racing over Chris Gabehart, who left JGR to work for Spire.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Coca-Cola 600 winner Daniel Suarez to stay with Spire for 2027 NASCAR season
