Realistically, Daniel Suarez had no shot at winning Charlotte’s Coca-Cola 600 last Sunday. for the most part, he had been hanging around mid-pack, which is where most Spire Motorsports cars run most of the time.
The race had been dominated by a bunch of snarling Toyotas, four of them belonging to Joe Gibbs Racing and another driven by 23XI’s Tyler Reddick, who would end up leading 119 laps.
Combined, Reddick and the four JGR entries were up front for 289 of the race’s 373 laps, leaving the rest of the field just 84 to fight over with only 50 of those under green. It seems nobody can stop Toyota. Right now, they’re the Jolly Green Giant of NASCAR.
Meanwhile, pretty much unnoticed, Suarez was making slow but steady progress. And as the race unfolded and everybody started making their final pit stops, he began moving up.
According to Lapraptor.com’s analytics, Suarez was 21st On lap 329. As more cars came in for fuel and tires, he jumped to 17th on lap 333, 15th on lap 349. And when he pitted on 356, he had moved up to seventh.
By now, everyone was trying to factor in the weather. How long would the race go? Would the raindrops which had been mildly disruptive in the early going become a deluge at the end?
Reddick was leading, with the other Toyotas in tow, when Suarez pitted. And then Ryan Sparks, Suarez’ crew chief, decided to make a move. With nothing to lose, he put two tires on instead of four, allowing Suarez to get back on the track ahead of Reddick and take the lead.
Now, it was wait-and-see. If the storms held off and the race went green most of the rest of the way, Suarez was a dead duck. With all the Toyotas and almost everybody else on four fresh tires instead of two, they would swarm past Suarez and he would be lucky to finish 10th.
“I don’t know, something in the back of my head told me to just go ahead and put on two,” Sparks said according to NASCAR’s website. “I kind of looked and saw what everybody else had for tires in front of us, and I figured there was going to be a good opportunity for us to be first or second. Just wanted to get that clean air and give ourselves a chance,” he added.
Still, if the race stayed green and he had to go any distance, Suarez was in trouble. With all the Toyotas behind him faster and on four tires, he needed yellow flags. Yellow flags, and rain.
Coming out of the pits, Suarez caught his first break. The race was under caution because of rain, and it stayed that way for three laps. It went green again on lap 360, but as the Toyotas started to close on Suarez, it went back to caution on 362.
The rain had become a little more steady, and the field slowly circled the track for eight more laps. Back to green on 370, with the Toyotas side-by-side and battling each other instead of Suarez.
Then, on 373, the skies above the speedway opened up. Red flag for rain with Suarez in front. No way to dry the track. Game, set, match. Sparks’ gamble had paid off, big time.
So what does this tell us about Spire Motorsports? Is this the little engine that could? One of several nondescript Cup teams finally breaking out of anonymity? Or is this just a one-time thing?
Spire was started by Jeff Dickerson in 2019, with Rick Hendrick serving as a consultant and providing engines for the team. In just its first year, with Justin Haley driving, Spire won Daytona’s Coke Zero Sugar 400.
It then went winless until this season, when highly touted Carson Hocevar won at Talladega. Hocevar got a ton of attention for his victory celebration, which had him hanging out the driver’s side window while doing burnouts and circling the track.
Just 23 and extremely aggressive on the track, Hocevar drew comparisons to Dale Earnhardt, which seemed a bit premature. And with Suarez now winning at Charlotte, some are ready to crown Spire as the next big thing in Cup.
But that’s likely a bridge too far. At this point. Spire still hasn’t done much. Two of its three wins are on superspeedways, where anybody can win.
Trevor Bayne won the Daytona 500, NASCAR’s biggest and most important event, when he was just 20 years old and had only run two Cup races in his entire career. He was driving for the Wood brothers, a tired team well past its glory days at the time.
If you strip away the superspeedways and Suarez’s win in the rain-shortened Charlotte race, nothing leads you to believe Spire will be the next 23XI.
Hocevar’s best finish this year, outside of the superspeedways, is a fourth at Darlington and he has only two in the top 10. Suarez’s best before Charlotte was a sixth at Texas and if you throw out his fifth at Atlanta, another superspeedway, he has just three top 10s counting Charlotte.
Spire’s third driver is veteran Michael McDowell, who once won the Daytona 500 and is pretty good on road courses. This year, he has two top 10s, a fifth on Austin’s road course and a second at Watkins Glen.
So Spire looks like a paper tiger, although Sparks says they’re on their way. It was tough, he said, when the Next Gen car came out and Spire was working out of a beat up building near Charlotte Motor Speedway.
“We all slept in the shop,” Sparks commented. “There were 20 of us working on two Cup teams each and every week and it was a grind. We’ve had a steady progression since then.
“And you’re seeing the results. We’ve been building this thing for five years. Nobody believed in us until Hocevar put us on the map at Talladega and now Daniel (Suarez) at Charlotte. Eventually, they’re going to take us seriously,” Sparks declared.
Problem is, everybody that’s not with Gibbs, Hendrick, Penske or now 23XI has been saying that for years and of all the second-tier teams out there, only 23XI has made it stick.
Especially in racing, it’s easy to talk about reaching lofty goals. But talking about what you’re going to do and then actually doing it, well, that’s two different things.
NASCAR NOTES
Three most likely winners at Nashville: 1-Denny Hamlin, 2-Tyler Reddick, 3-Christopher Bell. Last year’s winner at Nashville: Ryan Blaney. Top five at Nashville last year: 1-Blaney, 2-Carson Hocevar, 3-Hamlin, 4-Joey Logano, 5-William Byron.
Old Guy Sport’s Charlotte picks: 1-Hamlin, 2-Reddick, 3-Chase Elliott. Charlotte winner: Dennis Suarez. OGS season record, 5-5.
OGS competition index top 10 after 10 races: 1-Reddick 274, Hamlin 274; 3-Bell 172, 4-Elliott 166, 5-Ty Gibbs 163, 6-Kyle Larson 161, 7-Blaney 144, 8-Shane van Gisbergen 116, 9-Chase Briscoe 70, 10-Brad Keselowski 63.
OGS competition index on intermediate tracks (tracks most similar to Nashville): 1-Hamlin 198, 2-Reddick 169, 3-Elliott 105, 4-Bell 81, 5-Larson 78, 6-Keselowski 63, 7-Suarez 51, 8-Briscoe 36, 9-Byron 34, 10-Blaney 32.
