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DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- By his own admission, Daytona's Speedweeks last year was a struggle for then-rookie Daniel Suarez. His role in a multicar crash during qualifying and another pileup during the season-opening race did not win points with his new NASCAR XFINITY Series brethren.
One year later, it's a much more buoyant and respected Suarez in the Daytona International Speedway garage. The Mexican-born driver has a year of experience and improvement on his resume as he kicks off his second full XFINITY season in Saturday's PowerShares QQQ 300 (3:30 p.m. ET, FS1, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
"I feel like right now, we are a different driver and a different race team," Suarez said Tuesday at NASCAR Media Day, chalking up his 2015 missteps here to inexperience. "We know where we need to be. Our confidence level is different as well, so I really feel really good. I really feel like right now from one year to right now we have made a lot of ground, so really looking forward to trying to make something different on this superspeedway."
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After such a shaky start last February, Suarez hatched a successful Sunoco Rookie of the Year campaign, finishing fifth in the drivers' standings. The Joe Gibbs Racing driver turned in top-five efforts at short tracks, 1-mile layouts and intermediate-sized circuits, but none in the three superspeedway events (two at Daytona, one at Talladega).
Though he did cash in with his first Coors Light Pole Award when the series returned to Daytona in July, Suarez still said he had plenty to learn on the sport's biggest ovals.
"I really was thinking during the offseason about how to be successful at this race track, how to be good at it," Suarez said. "I just really think that last year, 2015 we were learning about so many race tracks and learning about everything, but in superspeedways I just feel like I was stuck a little bit, so I did a lot of homework to try to learn more about superspeedways, how to work on superspeedways, how to be a little bit better and I'm really looking forward to trying to be more successful on superspeedways than what I did last year."
Suarez, 24, plans to concentrate on vying for the XFINITY championship, but will again split time in the Camping World Truck Series with plans for a 13-race schedule -- the same number that he ran last year in an effort to gain valuable time behind the wheel. But there's also been preliminary talk, he admits, about a potential move up the ladder to the Sprint Cup Series in the future as part of JGR's rich crop of development drivers.
"Yeah, we have had that conversation a little bit here, a little bit there," Suarez says, "but at the end of the day, I'm one of those drivers that thinks if we do our job with what we are doing right now the future is going to take care of itself. Yeah, we've had a little bit of those conversations -- nothing for sure, really -- but I really think the most important deal right now for us is the NASCAR XFINITY Series and the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series."