Ross Chastain breaks silence on beef with Daniel Suarez, accuses former NASCAR teammate of dodging accountability

Ross Chastain declined comment on a post-race incident with Daniel Suarez after Las Vegas. The two nearly got into a fight, with the pair pushing each other before third parties could step in.

For his part, Suarez has opened up on the incident. He claims that after the race he went to apologize to Chastain for an incident that occurred on Turn 2 late in the day.

That’s when Chastain had some choice words and bowed up a bit. Chastain admitted to not handling things all that well when he spoke to reporters on Tuesday.

“Yeah, in the moment I definitely was hot and angry and would do things differently if I had time to think about it,” Chastain said, per video shared by Matt Weaver. “Yeah, definitely would not have swerved into him after the race. I didn’t mean to. I would do that different if I could go back. And then I wouldn’t shove him, for sure.”

So what led to Ross Chastain reacting like he did? He simply didn’t take too kindly to what Suarez had to say.

“I was over the conversation that he was trying to have, wanted him to leave, asked him to leave and he didn’t leave,” Chastain said. “Wanted him to back up. Was too close and just didn’t want to hear anything else he was saying because he wasn’t taking any accountability and I wanted him to.”

The two, of course, are former teammates at Trackhouse. That allowed Ross Chastain to get a good sense for who Suarez was firsthand.

And he claims that Suarez has always dodged accountability for incidents on the track. He went on.

“I’ve known Daniel now for a long time and have lived it inside of our four walls, that there’s, in my opinion, not enough accountability, and there wasn’t post-race,” Chastain said. “And in the heat of the moment I reacted definitely worse, and if I had just a few minutes to calm down getting out of the car, definitely a day of struggling through the mid-teens when we expected more out of the 1 car causes me to not have as much, I guess, wick to be able to burn. Unfair in the grand scheme of things to react that way and not right.”

As for whether there would be any lingering beef on the track, Ross Chastain somewhat dodged the question. Instead, he focused on the fact that the two haven’t been running all that similarly for most of the year.

“Well Daniel and I have known each other for several years, so I would say in the grand scheme of our careers that’s quite a while,” Chastain said. “And there was a short period there where we got along, so I look back at that time and what went on and how we got there and how we were around that time, in the short time we got along.

“He’s been faster than me, so he really shouldn’t worry about me, I don’t think, because they’ve just flat out been faster. They had one bad run, it just happened to be at the end of the race and we were faster on the last run. So if they keep up their pace he doesn’t have to worry about me because he’s ahead of me. So it’s not something that I think — right now we’re not going to cross paths much because he’s faster than me.”