Spire Motorsports recently announced that they would be moving on from Justin Haley following the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series season.
Though Haley's improbable rain-shortened Daytona International Speedway win in 2019 remains the team's only victory, this was a move that was not particularly surprising considering his performance relative to veteran teammate Michael McDowell and young teammate Carson Hocevar after effectively being "traded" from Rick Ware Racing before the 2024 season ended.
But the replacement for Haley, who has just two top 10 finishes in 2025, was always relatively obvious: Daniel Suarez.
Suarez (also expectedly) lost his ride with Trackhouse Racing when it was finally confirmed that development driver and current Xfinity Series championship leader Connor Zilisch would be replacing him alongside Ross Chastain and Shane van Gisbergen next year.
The latest Suarez announcement is a win-win for both sides. Suarez is set to continue competing at the Cup level, with a team not only capable of consistently competing for solid results but seemingly more willing to listen to his feedback and input, and Spire Motorsports have landed a driver who instantly becomes one of the best drivers in team history, even if that history is relatively short.
But nowhere in the announcement was "multi-year" referenced, and quite frankly, given what we know about NASCAR contracts, even if was, we'd be taking it with a grain of salt.
Kyle Busch to Spire Motorsports in 2027?
It's led to speculation that a move many thought could have happened on several occasions before might actually be on the cards for 2027.
Kyle Busch sold his entire Kyle Busch Motorsports operation to Spire Motorsports after the 2023 season, and he has continued to compete in five Truck Series races per year with Spire Motorsports. He was linked to the team for 2025 when Corey LaJoie's future was in question, but he ultimately returned for the third and final year of his original Richard Childress Racing deal.
Rumors of a change of scenery for Busch persisted in early 2025, with 23XI Racing even emerging as a potential suitor to bring Busch back into the Toyota fold in their third car, but he extended his deal with Richard Childress Racing for another year.
However, things are not improving for Busch at Richard Childress Racing, and with no wins since he scored three in the first half of 2023, they are arguably worse now than they were even midway through the 2024 season, his first career winless season as a full-time driver – and first without a playoff berth since 2012.
Given how Busch's 2023 season started, it's hard to imagine that he's "washed up" and that he truly fell off a cliff overnight. And while Austin Dillon has found victory lane in each of the past two seasons, that's more down to the fact that he is a Richmond Raceway specialist, because he's basically an also-ran everywhere else (which, to be quite honest, is exactly what Busch is at the moment).
Unless Hocevar gets called up to a bigger team, he appears to be Spire Motorsports' top driver for the foreseeable future. But what if Suarez doesn't perform well in 2026? And what does McDowell's future hold after what is set to be his age-41 season?
At this point, it's hard to see Busch willingly extending his Richard Childress Racing deal (again) if there are other options on the table. And given his ongoing Spire Motorsports connections, it's hard to imagine a world where there isn't at least some semblance of mutual interest if Busch's 2026 season is anything like his 2024 and 2025 campaigns.