Professional lip-readers would have reached the conclusion after the mid-March NASCAR Cup Series race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway that Trackhouse Racing's Ross Chastain, during his tussle on pit road with former teammate Daniel Suarez, shouted "you got fired!" at the new driver of the No. 7 Spire Motorsports Chevrolet.
Suarez had made it a habit, even if unintentionally, of running into Trackhouse Racing cars over the first month and a half or so of the season, and it was starting to look from the outside that he was merely holding a petty grudge against the Justin Marks-owned team for letting him go.
Suarez won only two races in five years behind the wheel of the No. 99 Chevrolet, and he was clearly the weakest link after a 29th place finish in the 2025 point standings, following his third missed playoff berth during those five seasons. The team opted to turn to 19-year-old phenom Connor Zilisch to take his place alongside Chastain and road course ace Shane van Gisbergen in 2026.
Given the fact that Suarez also spent three winless years between Joe Gibbs Racing and Stewart-Haas Racing in seasons during which those two teams were dominant, not many folks took the suggestion seriously that perhaps Suarez's feedback was not valued enough by Trackhouse Racing during his final few seasons, leading to the bulk of his struggles.
Yet in his new ride, Suarez seems to be thriving.
While his sixth place finish at Texas Motor Speedway might not be his best outright result of the 2026 season, it was his best race from start to finish. He qualified on the front row alongside teammate Carson Hocevar and overcame early issues to score stage points in stage two and finish in the top seven for the third time this year.
He has been inside the provisional playoff picture pretty much all season and currently finds himself 14th, 36 points above the cut line and notably 89 points ahead of teammate Michael McDowell.
And now Trackhouse Racing is downright terrible, right down there with the likes of Richard Childress Racing in the battle for worst Chevrolet program aside from the backmarker single-car teams of Rick Ware Racing and Haas Factory Team.
As Beyond the Flag contributor Ryan McCafferty recently put it, perhaps they are driving their own sponsor-supplied Kubota tractors on Saturdays and Sundays these days.
Chastain has yet to finish in the top 15 in a non-superspeedway race this season, a far cry from his 2022 form that nearly won him a championship in his first season with the team.
Van Gisbergen only has a remote chance at making the playoffs if he sweeps the remaining road and street course races, thanks to the 15 bonus points that come with winning those. Even then, he probably wouldn't get in.
And Zilisch, whom a lot of experts remain extremely high on, is at risk of being made out to look like one of the most overhyped drivers in series history and having his career ruined, because the "next Jeff Gordon" has yet to place higher than 14th and is a dismal 33rd in the standings.
Perhaps Pitbull's departure from the team meant more than anybody cares to admit.
Spire Motorsports, meanwhile, have quietly emerged as a threat to Hendrick Motorsports as the sport's top bowtie organization, and while we won't say that they are on the level of Rick Hendrick's team yet, HMS' struggles and Spire's surge make it a lot closer than anybody would have previously been willing to suggest.
We're not going to say that Suarez can be a championship contender; we never would have suggested that while he was at Trackhouse either. But Hocevar has a win and four other top 10 finishes and sits sixth in points, and Suarez has been one of the sport's most consistent drivers over the past two months, placing no lower than 20th.
Sure, he may have gotten "fired". But Trackhouse Racing fired him straight into a seat that he's been making the most of, something that had quite literally not been true at any point during his first nine seasons in the series.
In his case, what really happened is he fell upward into a real contender, while his former employer finds its trio of cars running laps down in the 20s on an almost weekly basis.
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