In seven years, Spire Motorsports has transformed from a NASCAR Cup Series backmarker to a budding contender.
The team, once famous for scoring one of the strangest and unlikely wins of all time with Justin Haley at Daytona International Speedway in its debut year and little else, is now living large with two Cup wins in the last month and its biggest trophy yet: a Coca-Cola 600.
Facing impending weather and a Toyota juggernaut that had dominated the entire evening, Daniel Suarez’s crew chief Ryan Sparks rolled the dice with a two-tire pit stop on lap 356 that vaulted Suarez from 14th to the lead. With the help of restart pushes from Kyle Larson, Suarez held off the dominant Toyotas on two separate restarts and was out front when a rainstorm rolled in and ended the race for good on lap 373.
Less than a month earlier, Carson Hocevar fended off Chris Buescher at Talladega Superspeedway to score his first Cup victory and Spire’s first in seven years. Add Texas Motor Speedway a week later — where Hocevar and Suarez qualified 1-2 and ran top 10 all day — and Michael McDowell’s runner-up finish behind a dominant Shane van Gisbergen at Watkins Glen International the week after that, and all three teams at Spire have been humming like a well-oiled machine.
The wins won’t lock Hocevar and Suarez into the postseason as they did in years past, but they’ve performed so well that they might not even need it. We’re halfway through the regular season, and both Hocevar and Suarez are top 10 in points with nearly a full-race lead over the 16th-place cutoff.
Hocevar’s performance is no surprise. He’s been a rising star in Cup ever since his 2024 rookie season, and his first Cup win wasn’t a matter of if, but when. That Talladega triumph is the exclamation point for his year-three breakout, as he’s improved his average finish by six spots year-over-year and scored a season-best three top-five finishes.
Suarez, on the other hand? He’s having an excellent year that few saw coming. After a disastrous 2025 saw him finish 29th in points and get the boot from Trackhouse Racing, very little was thought of his move to Spire over the offseason. But he’s put everyone on notice not only with the Coca-Cola 600 win, but by putting together the week-in, week-out consistency he had been lacking for much of his career. This year, Suarez has an active streak of nine consecutive top-20 finishes and a season average finish of 13.9, which would be the best of his Cup career by a mile if the season were to end today.
But while Spire is exceeding expectations, the team is far from a true contender, as there are only a handful of races this year where the team has had true top-10 speed. And without that speed, a few unlucky weekends would be enough to send Hocevar and Suarez back down to the Chase bubble after being safely above it for weeks.
What Spire’s team has been great at, however, is maximizing its days. And while there’s still a long way until the team captures consistent top-10 and race-winning speed, Spire’s last month has shown it is inching closer and closer to that benchmark.
Of course, the story of Spire’s 2026 season wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the courtroom and Spire’s new Chief Motorsports Officer Chris Gabehart, as Joe Gibbs Racing continues to weigh legal action against its former competition director who is accused of stealing proprietary information from the team.
The trial for Joe Gibbs Racing v. Chris Gabehart and Spire Motorsports won’t begin until January 2027. But with everything that has happened up to this point, there’s a hint of irony that Suarez and Spire’s latest win in the 600 came by holding off the faster JGR cars of Christopher Bell and Denny Hamlin until the skies opened up.
Stephen Stumpf is the NASCAR Content Director for Frontstretch and is a three-year veteran of the site. His weekly column is “Stat Sheet,” and he formerly wrote "4 Burning Questions" for three years. He also writes commentaries, contributes to podcasts, edits articles and is frequently at the track for on-site coverage.
Find Stephen on Twitter @stephen_stumpf