Suarez, Chastain Feud Boils Over After Las Vegas Clash

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Suarez, Chastain Feud Boils OverMeg Oliphant - Getty Images

Conflicts between teammates often dissipate when one moves to another race organization, but that didn’t happen with Daniel Suarez and Ross Chastain as the discord between the two boiled over at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, and it doesn’t appear it will disappear any time soon, if ever.

To recount the Las Vegas incident, Chastain swerved and hit Suarez’s Spire Motorsports Chevrolet on the race’s cooldown lap. That incident had been precipitated by a couple of other bumping events during the race. After exiting their cars on pit road, Suarez confronted Chastain. During the verbal confrontation, Chastain shoved Suarez. Team members and a NASCAR official quickly diffused the situation.

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Chastain later admitted he was “hot and angry” and would have done things “different if I had time to think about it.” He said he definitely reacted worse than he would have if he had just had a few minutes to calm down. He put his thoughts into a text, sent it to Suarez, and said they’d played telephone tag since.

“If I could go back… I wouldn’t shove him for sure,” Chastain said. “I just was over the conversation that he was trying to have, wanted to leave, asked him to leave, didn’t leave … didn’t want to hear anything else he was saying because he wasn’t taking any accountability. There’s always a reason why it wasn’t his fault.”

The day before Darlington Raceway’s Goodyear 400 Suarez said he “could not believe it” when he learned that Chastain said he didn’t take accountability for his actions.

“I can almost guarantee you that if you ask every single driver here about accountability, he’s the one that has to work on that,” Suarez said. “I mean he spun me out in Sonoma the last few months of the season last year. All I had from him was a little smile and like, ‘Man, it wasn’t intentional’ on Tuesday.

“I’m a straightforward kind of guy. If I feel like I made a mistake or it’s a gray area, I’m gonna be up front with it. I’m a straight shooter, and I like people to be straight shooters with me as well.”

To understand the animosity between the two, one must go back to the four years they were teammates at Trackhouse Racing. Suarez was the team’s first driver, joining the operation in 2021 when Armando Perez, better known as Pitbull, was co-owner with Justin Marks. Then Chastain joined Trackhouse in 2022 after Marks purchased Chip Ganassi Racing. It apparently didn’t take long for the two men’s relationship to sour.

“I’ve known Daniel now for a long time and have lived it inside of our four walls that there’s, in my opinion, not enough accountability,” Chastain said. “There was a short period there where we got along.”

Suarez described their relationship as like a wave.

Daniel Suarez and Ross Chastain when they got along momentarily.Chris Graythen - Getty Images

“I remember it started bad, and then we were good for a while, and then bad again, and then good again,” Suarez said. “Sometimes I felt like he wasn’t straight forward for some reason, especially last year. I felt like in general the team was doing a good job, in a way, showing something else to everyone else than what was actually happening internally.”

For Chastain, it’s a simple situation.

“He’s a guy that I just do not get along with,” Chastain said. “I don’t agree with the way he handles things.”

Suarez described himself and Chastain as “very, very different” people.

“The only thing that we’re similar in is our work ethic, but everything else, we’re very, very different,” Suarez said.

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