Suarez, Chastain Feud Boils Over After Las Vegas Clash
On-track contact and a post-race confrontation reignite long-standing tension between former teammates
Suarez, Chastain Feud Boils Over Meg Oliphant - Getty Images Conflicts between teammates often dissipate when one moves to another race organization, but that didn’t happen with Daniel Suarez and Ross Chastain as the discord between the two boiled over at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, and it doesn’t appear it will disappear any time soon, if ever. To recount the Las Vegas incident, Chastain swerved and hit Suarez’s Spire Motorsports Chevrolet on the race’s cooldown lap. That incident had been precipitated by a couple of other bumping events during the race.
After exiting their cars on pit road, Suarez confronted Chastain. During the verbal confrontation, Chastain shoved Suarez. Team members and a NASCAR official quickly diffused the situation.
Chastain later admitted he was “hot and angry” and would have done things “different if I had time to think about it. ” He said he definitely reacted worse than he would have if he had just had a few minutes to calm down. He put his thoughts into a text, sent it to Suarez, and said they’d played telephone tag since.
“If I could go back… I wouldn’t shove him for sure,” Chastain said. “I just was over the conversation that he was trying to have, wanted to leave, asked him to leave, didn’t leave … didn’t want to hear anything else he was saying because he wasn’t taking any accountability. There’s always a reason why it wasn’t his fault.