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Bob PockrassNASCAR
LONG POND, Pa. — Daniel Suarez has somewhat impatiently waited for the NASCAR Cup Series races where he would run amid the leaders all day.
That still didn’t happen Sunday at Pocono Raceway. What did happen was even better for Suarez in his NASCAR Cup Series career.
Suarez followed his first career pole Saturday with a second-place finish Sunday in the Gander Outdoors 400, where he at one point dropped out of the top 10 before the team used strategy to earn him track position that he was able to then maintain to the finish.
“I didn’t care if I was second, third or fifth — it doesn’t really matter,” Suarez said. “We wanted to get that first win and we’re this close. I’m sure we’re going to get it soon.”
The first full-time Mexican driver in NASCAR’s top division, Suarez enjoyed a historical weekend as the first Mexican to win a NASCAR Cup Series pole and the highest finish ever for a Mexican driver in series history.
The 26-year-old said it was the best race of his career.
“Just the performance of the whole race, running up front, we lost a little bit of the top-10 car in the middle of the race, made some adjustments and we got it back,” Suarez said. “It was for sure our best race of the year.”
Suarez just didn’t have enough to earn the win as his Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Kyle Busch was able to hold him off and win by 1.788 seconds.
“I kind of feel bad I was the guy that was in front of Daniel when he finished second,” Busch said. “He could have won. He was right there with us all day long. He trailed us that whole [last] run and I couldn’t shake him. I couldn’t get away from him and I was trying.”
Suarez sits 20th in the NASCAR Cup Series and likely needs to win in the next five races to make the playoffs as he sits 96 points behind the current cutoff.
“It’s just good momentum,” Suarez said. “My team really needed something like this to happen. We have five more races ahead before the playoffs, so we’re going to try to do exactly the same thing we did this weekend and try to make it.”
Even if he doesn’t make the playoffs, Suarez might look back at the Pocono race weekend as the one that triggers a run to the playoffs in the future.
“I wish this kind of race was happening two months ago and everything was going to be easier, but that happens sometimes,” Suarez said. “We’re still a new team and we’re still figuring things out sometime. That’s part of racing.”