NASCAR: What’s next for Gaunt Brothers Racing?

With Daniel Suarez not returning to the team for the 2021 NASCAR Cup Series season, what is next for Gaunt Brothers Racing?

Daniel Suarez announced his third team switch in the last three seasons back in October when he confirmed that he is slated to drive for Trackhouse Racing Team, Justin Marks’s new team, in the 2021 NASCAR Cup Series season.

This move was announced several weeks after he announced that he would not be back with Gaunt Brothers Racing for what would have been a second season behind the wheel of the #96 Toyota.

He hasn’t spent more than one year with a team since he competed for Joe Gibbs Racing in 2017 and 2018; he spent just one year with Stewart-Haas Racing in 2019 prior to his arrival with Marty Gaunt’s organization in 2020.

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There had been rumors that Gaunt Brothers Racing could be a landing spot for Bubba Wallace, who announced last month that he would not be back with Richard Petty Motorsports for what would have been a fourth season next year.

But Wallace is set to drive for 23XI Racing, the new team started by Michael Jordan and Denny Hamlin, behind the wheel of the #23 Toyota. So what’s next for Gaunt Brothers Racing? There is still a belief that they will seek additional investors and try to acquire a charter. Ideally, they want to be as competitive as Furniture Row Racing, the 2017 champions and 2018 runners-up which had a technical alliance with Joe Gibbs Racing from 2016 until they folded after 2018.

If this is the case, they could look to move a young Toyota Racing Development driver behind the wheel of the #96 Toyota for next year. Naturally, two drivers who would be poised for that promotion are Brandon Jones and Harrison Burton, who both compete full-time for Joe Gibbs Racing’s Xfinity Series team.

But Jones, who won three races this season after entering the year with just one win over four years of full-time competition at the sport’s second highest level, is already slated to return to Joe Gibbs Racing next year.

Burton is a rookie who won four times in 2020 despite finishing in 12th place in last year’s Truck Series championship standings when only 11 drivers ran every race on the calendar, and he is slated to return to the team again as well.

So those two drivers are out of the picture.

Ideally, they would want to end up at Joe Gibbs Racing’s Cup Series team within the next few years, but there simply isn’t room at the moment, so sticking with the Xfinity team is the best-case scenario. The only other Toyota team in the Cup Series is the new one-car 23XI Racing team, and Wallace has been confirmed as their driver on a multi-year deal.

Plus, Toyota Racing Development president David Wilson has also recently stated that he doesn’t believed any of the organization’s young drivers are ready for Cup rides at this point anyway, and Jones and Burton are the highest up the ladder among those young drivers.

Let’s also remember that Joe Gibbs Racing only managed to find a place for Christopher Bell, who won 15 races in just two years for the team in the Xfinity Series before his promotion to the Joe Gibbs Racing-affiliated Leavine Family Racing team this past season, at their four-car team for 2021 by releasing the 24-year-old Erik Jones, something that neither they nor Toyota had any real interest in doing.

Two-time champion Kyle Busch, three-time Daytona 500 winner Denny Hamlin and 2017 champion Martin Truex Jr. don’t appear to be going anywhere for the foreseeable future, and despite the fact that two of them are quadragenarians, there is no reason for that to change anytime soon.

So what about John Hunter Nemechek, who recently announced that he won’t be back with Front Row Motorsports next year, or Ty Dillon, who lost his ride with Germain Racing when their charter was sold to 23XI Racing?

It is looking more like Gaunt Brothers Racing are going to hire somebody who is currently outside of the Toyota fold to run the #96 Toyota full-time in 2021. Whether or not they acquire a charter or land additional investors remains to be seen.