Trackhouse Racing and Daniel Suárez announced Tuesday that they had mutually agreed to part ways at the end of the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series season, marking one of the first dominoes in the annual “Silly Season” shift of personnel.
As driver of the No. 99 Chevrolet, Suárez scored both of his Cup Series victories under the Trackhouse banner — Sonoma in 2022 and Atlanta last season — and his looming departure at year’s end creates a vacancy at one of NASCAR’s fastest-growing organizations. Suárez currently ranks 29th in the Cup Series standings at the season’s midpoint.
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Suárez joined the Justin Marks-founded team as the driver for the team’s inaugural season of competition in 2021, when it forged into the Cup Series as a single-car operation. The organization has since grown to three chartered teams, with Suárez aligned with teammates Ross Chastain and Shane van Gisbergen.
“The role Daniel has played in the Trackhouse origin story and its first five years will remain a valued part of the company’s history forever,” Marks said in a statement. “His commitment, work ethic and dedication to the effort is one of the most impressive things I personally have seen in my career. We will forever be thankful and honored that Daniel chose to spend many incredible years with us. We are proud of his wins, his successes, the growth of his brand, and his emergence as a valuable athlete in America’s greatest motorsport. But, most of all, I’m proud of him as a friend. I’m truly excited to see what awaits him in the next chapter of his amazing career. We are grateful for the professionalism, effort and heart he’s brought to our organization.”
Suárez released his own statement shortly before the announcement as “a message to my amigos.”
“Trackhouse and I have mutually agreed to part ways at the end of the 2025 season,” Suárez said. “I’ve had some of the best years of my Cup Series career at Trackhouse. We had great successes as a team and I gained some incredible friends. We took a team nobody had even heard of in 2021 and in just a couple of years we were winning races and running up front on a weekly basis. Just like the seasons in a year, sometimes things change and we have mutually agreed to each go in our own direction. I wish Trackhouse nothing but the best, this 99 team will always be special to me. And like I always say, the best is ahead!”
Suárez has yet to qualify for this year’s NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs, needing a victory in the final eight regular-season races to reach the postseason. Both of his teammates have clinched playoff berths, with Chastain winning the Coca-Cola 600 in May and SVG prevailing in Suárez’s home country of Mexico three weeks later.
The 33-year-old veteran said June 4 that his free-agent status was a complication ahead of the NASCAR Cup Series’ first event in Mexico City. “Definitely, it’s a distraction,” Suárez said. “I won’t sit here and tell you that it doesn’t really matter. It’s definitely a distraction, but I’m trying to be as smart as possible and to put all this stuff on the side and to just do my thing on the track.”
Suárez’s most recent contract extension with Trackhouse was announced in August 2024, a one-year deal that kept him in the No. 99 Chevy for a fifth season. But in reaching that agreement, Suárez said that he hoped for company-wide performance gains to sustain their relationship.
“There is a lot of things in Trackhouse that are adjusting and changing,” Suárez said then. “Performance-wise, we’re not exactly where we want to be — not just in the 99 but in Trackhouse as a company, and we have to make sure that we fix that before we want to go any longer. This goes really both ways.”
The growth of Trackhouse has been steady. The organization expanded to two teams in 2022, adding Chastain in the first season of NASCAR’s Next Gen car. The team also founded Project 91 that year as an avenue to attract global motorsports stars to NASCAR’s top series, setting a course to becoming a three-car operation this season with SVG’s promotion to Cup.
The team also signed teenage prospect Connor Zilisch to a developmental deal, partnering with JR Motorsports for a full Xfinity Series campaign this year. The 18-year-old rookie, who has made three Cup starts for Trackhouse this season, is a top candidate to replace Suárez in the No. 99. He ranks fifth in the Xfinity Series standings with two wins (COTA, Pocono) and a series-leading four pole positions this year.
Suárez is in his ninth season of Cup Series competition. He was promoted to NASCAR’s top division after winning the Xfinity Series championship in 2016, called up by Joe Gibbs Racing after the abrupt retirement of Hall of Famer Carl Edwards. Suárez spent two years with Gibbs before single-season stops at Stewart-Haas Racing and Gaunt Brothers Racing.
When Trackhouse Entertainment Group first announced its big-league NASCAR effort, Suárez was tapped as its first driver. “We are building a team of winners and Daniel has delivered just about every time he’s sat in race-winning equipment,” Marks said in a statement at Trackhouse’s launch in October 2020.