Daniel Suarez ready to celebrate first NASCAR Cup win soon

With four consecutive top-10 finishes — including a career-best third-place run at Watkins Glen last weekend — the driver of the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota has jumped from 18th to 15th standings.

Currently, there are three spots open in the Playoff grid. But with Suarez sitting 101 points behind 10th-place Clint Bowyer and 129 points behind his teammate Matt Kenseth — who is on the bubble — nothing short of a win will lock Suarez into the post-season.

Although Suarez only has four chances to win before the Playoffs begin, the Monster Energy Cup Series returns to Michigan International Speedway this weekend — the site of the driver’s first win in the Xfinity Series.

“Super excited to be here at Michigan again,” Suarez said. “Already this is one of those places that definitely brings good memories and hopefully now that we have good momentum going on, hopefully we can keep that up.”

After 22 races this season, Suarez is starting to experience tracks for a second time in a Cup car. The 25-year-old rookie improved his finishes significantly at both Daytona, where he finished 29th in February and 17th in July, and Pocono, where he finished seventh two weeks following a 15th-place finish in June.

“I think as a team we’ve been getting better and better,” Suarez said. “I feel like our race cars are better. I feel like as a team the 19 group is much better. We have, like I said, we have a notebook and we know what to do now and I feel like now we should be able to run in the top 10, hopefully in the top five.

“And like I said in the past, when you run in the top 5 consistent, you can win any time. It’s just the way that the race is going to work out, but if you are right there, it can happen anytime. We just have to put ourselves in that position. Hopefully we can find good speed right out of the box in the first practice and move from there.”

Click below to watch Suarez discuss his historic NASCAR Xfinity win at Michigan: