Daniel Suarez Survives and Advances in Playoffs Despite 31st Place Run

It wasn't pretty, but Daniel Suarez and the No. 99 Trackhouse Racing team will continue their quest for the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series championship after a rough 31st-place outing at Bristol Motor Speedway.

After climbing from his car following a hard-fought race where his Playoff hopes were in jeopardy for the majority of the event, Suarez lamented the lack of practice time in the NASCAR Cup Series affecting his team's ability to turn around a car that wasn't great out of the box when they arrived at the 0.533-mile short track.

"It was a struggle. Since yesterday when we unloaded the car for first practice, we just didn't have the speed," Suarez admitted. "As you know, with a short amount of practice, qualifying, and going to the race, if you don't have speed out of the trailer, it's very, very difficult to bring it back to speed. We made it better, but it wasn't good enough. We were running 30th, 28th, 32nd all night long, and that's what we had."

Despite the rough weekend, Suarez ended the night with an 11-point advantage over Ty Gibbs, which allowed the driver of the No. 99 Chevrolet to advance to the Round of 12 of the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs.

Saturday's race at Bristol was nearly the reason that Suarez was eliminated from the Playoffs, but solid performances in the opening two races of the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs Round of 16 were a big part of the reason Suarez heads into Kansas Speedway still alive in the championship fight.

"Luckily we had a great Atlanta, decent Watkins Glen after a broken wheel, and we were able to build a cushion, and we definitely used every single point out of that cushion," Suarez said.

The driver, who won at Atlanta Motor Speedway earlier this year in a three-wide photo finish, started the Playoffs off with a runner-up finish at Atlanta Motor Speedway and then followed that up with a solid 13th-place run at Watkins Glen.

The day at The Glen was much better than the 13th-place finish, but as Suarez alluded to, he suffered a broken wheel, which sent him spinning into the sand trap on Lap 38. He would return to the track and would rally over the final 53 laps of that race.

While Suarez's finishes in the opening two races of the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs were big to his Playoff advancement on Saturday night at Bristol, his tenacity and ability to make life a living hell for Gibbs, who was on the lead lap and attempted to pass the lapped Suarez on the final run of the race, played a huge factor as well.

"You know, I can only control so much. I can only control what the 99 car can do and everything else is out of my hands. At one point there, I felt bad for the 54 because I had to hold him back quite a bit and he got passed, but I had to do that," Suarez explained. "I wasn't fast enough to run away from him, so I had to play games to be able to affect him as much as possible in a clean way."

Suarez's serving as a thorn in Gibbs' side led to the driver of the No. 54 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota burning his tires off, which then resulted in Gibbs fading over the final few laps as he dropped from eighth in the running order to 15th.

Gibbs fading built a more comfortable points buffer for Suarez, who was able to close out the race to move on to the next round, which kicks off this weekend at Kansas Speedway, where Suarez doesn't have an ultra-strong track record.

In 15 career starts, Suarez has just two top-10 finishes at the 1.5-mile intermediate oval. But if he can snatch a top-10 to top-15 finish, the final two races of the Round of 12 line up decently for Suarez and his team.

Talladega Superspeedway follows Kansas, and with how Suarez has performed at Atlanta Motor Speedway, another drafting track, the 2.66-mile superspeedway in Alabama serves as a big-time opportunity for Suarez to nab his second win of the season.

Suarez is also a decent road racer, which makes you assume he'll be able to snag a decent finish at the Charlotte Motor Speedway ROVAL. That being said, he has had rough luck at the ROVAL in his six starts at that track. Maybe he'll be able to turn that around this time around, and who knows, maybe Suarez will be able to do what it takes to advance to the Round of 8 of the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs.

Photo Credit: Tyson Gifford, Racing America