KANSAS CITY, Kan. – The rain was coming down hard and pooling up across the garage area at a rate that was putting Thursday afternoon practices for Friday night’s Toyota Tundra 250 NASCAR Camping World Truck Series at Kansas Speedway in serious jeopardy.
Might have been a good weekend to stay home and get some rest, it was suggested to rookie Daniel Suarez, who has raced in all nine XFINITY Series and all three Camping World Truck Series events this year.
Not a chance, the Kyle Busch Motorsports driver said.
“Take an off weekend? I want to be in a race car,” Suarez said. “Every single weekend. My ‘off’ weekends will come in December. That’s when we’ll have time for that.”
Suarez’s plan to plant himself in drivers’ seats in the two top-tier NASCAR series is understandable. Especially these days. Even with his youth, his relative inexperience and his relative newness to stock cars, he appears to be creeping toward phenom status.
The 23-year-old native of Monterrey, Mexico is having himself a year. In the eight XFINITY starts he’s logged since getting caught up in a wreck during Speedweeks, Suarez has six top-15 finishes with a career best of second three weeks ago in Bristol.
Better still, he’s finished in the top nine in each of his Camping World starts in 2015 with finishes of fourth and sixth the past two races at Atlanta and Martinsville respectively.
Suarez is embedded in NASCAR and he’s looking good. And nerves? None. Not even the prospect of losing practice time Thursday at a track he was visiting for the first time in his life.
“I was actually thinking about that an hour ago,” Suarez said rain washing out Friday’s track time. “To be honest, I feel like I’m a very lucky driver to be with race teams like Kyle Busch Motorsports and Joe Gibbs Racing (his XFINITY team). I’m very confident that I’m going to have a fast truck in this race. The worry will be on me to adapt to the race track and to the truck. Definitely, it’s going to be a challenge, but I don’t feel like we are going to be super horrible if we don’t have practice.
“To be honest, I feel like that chemistry and that communication has been getting better and better with my crew chief and my engineers in the No. 51 Tundra. I’m a little worried about that, but I feel like if we don’t have practice, nobody will have practice then. We’re going to be in good shape anyway.”
Source: NASCAR Wire Service
