After Daniel Suarez got a little loose on a turn at Las Vegas late in the race, he accidentally squeezed Ross Chastain toward the wall. Chastain was not happy, and he let Suarez know about it after the race.
Chastain confronted Suarez on pit road, shoving him and letting loose a string of verbal accostment. That’s what did not sit well with Suarez.
Forget the fight. It’s what Chastain said that has Daniel Suarez thinking this is a beef that will linger.
“At the end of the day I think what happens on the racetrack happens on the racetrack,” Suarez said on Sirius XM NASCAR Radio. “I have had situations with several drivers, Ross has as well. The racing stuff is the racing stuff, and that’s fine. That’s OK. We are going to continue to compete. We’re going to get to each other again in the future and it’s going to be fine.”
Though no blows were thrown, Daniel Suarez came out of the encounter reiterating that what Chastain did was wrong. You can’t simply say anything you want about another driver, he said.
“The part, in my opinion, the line that he crossed is the stuff that he said afterwards,” Suarez said. “That’s low, that’s disrespectful, that’s not OK. You know? And the other part I was most disappointed, what happened on the racetrack, on Monday and Tuesday it’s already move on and we go on to the next one. But the stuff that people say, those words, they don’t go away. So it’s a little bit sad to me the way that he just couldn’t control himself and the stuff that he said.”
Will things be extra frosty between Chastain and Daniel Suarez going forward? They just might be.
For his part, Chastain said Suarez has consistently been faster than him this season. So he’s not sure how many on-track encounters they’ll have.
Regardless, Daniel Suarez isn’t getting over it anytime soon. He concluded.
“But yeah, I mean that stuff is really going to last a little bit longer than a week, especially for me, because I lost a lot of respect for him as a person and also as a driver,” Suarez said. “But on the racetrack I think everything is going to be the same. He’s just another competitor.”