NASCAR goes south of the border to
grow fan base with its 1st Cup Series race in Mexico City
[June 11, 2025]
By JENNA FRYER
NASCAR's first international Cup Series race of the modern era is
all about the eyeballs, specifically new fans in the Mexico City
market.
NASCAR will be on the track Friday for the first of three days of
racing at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodríguez, one of the most popular
stops on the Formula 1 calendar and Ben Kennedy's newest project.
The great-grandson of NASCAR founder Bill France Sr., Kennedy has
taken the family business beyond its comfortable confines before.
Kennedy in 2022 moved the preseason exhibition Clash from its
longtime home at Daytona International Speedway in Florida to a
temporary track built inside Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Kennedy
this year moved the Clash to The Madhouse — the historic Bowman Gray
Stadium, which had last hosted a Cup race in 1971, in Winston-Salem,
North Carolina.
NASCAR under Kennedy also returned to North Wilkesboro Speedway in
North Carolina for the first time since 1977 when the All-Star race
was moved there three years ago. He allowed dirt at Bristol Motor
Speedway, a hybrid road course and oval at Charlotte Motor Speedway,
alongside his biggest undertaking: NASCAR's first street race, held
in downtown Chicago.
He also had his eyes set on expanding internationally, which will
come Sunday with the first points-paying international race in the
Cup Series since 1958. It is only third time in 77 years that
NASCAR’s top series will run an event that counts in the
championship outside the United States. The last two times were in
Canada; the Cup Series also has held exhibitions in Japan and
Australia.
“Our biggest opportunity to grow as a sport is international,”
Kennedy said when he announced Mexico City was replacing one of the
two races on the schedule allocated to Richmond International
Raceway.
“The U.S. is always going to be our mainstay and our next
opportunity was to expand internationally," he said. "We said we’ve
wanted to do this for a long time, but also needed to make sure it
was the right time, the right partners and the right location.
Mexico City checked every box. To be in one of the biggest cities
globally — over 20 million people that live in the city — is a
massive opportunity for us to bring the sport.”
The weekend includes the second-tier Xfinity Series and the NASCAR
Mexico Series. It's a strong return to a market that devours the
entire F1 weekend ticket package within an hour of them becoming
available.
Mexicans have proven to be rabid motorsports fans but haven't gotten
a chance to see NASCAR's big names since 2008, the final year of a
four-year run of Xfinity races. Kyle Busch, Denny Hamlin and Martin
Truex Jr. were winners during the four-year stretch.
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Fans cheers as Mexico's Adrian Fernadez of the Lowe's Hatachi
Powertools Chevrolet team takes the lead during the Nascar Busch
series race at the Hermanos Rodriguez racetrack in Mexico City,
Mexico, Saturday, March 6, 2005. (AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills, file)
Daniel Suarez, the former Xfinity champion and
native of Monterrey, is NASCAR's face of the event. He raced the
circuit 13 times with a different layout in the NASCAR Mexico
Series, and three of Suarez's starts were wins.
“I’m super excited for the event. I’m super excited to live the
moment because the first time is going to only happen once,” Suarez
said. "I’m really trying to be as present as possible, enjoy the
moment and try to execute the best possible weekend that we can. We
know that we are capable of winning the race, but that’s not the
goal. The goal is the execution of the entire weekend, and hopefully
the win is the result of the execution part.”
The planning that has gone into Mexico City, one of 38 events on the
Cup schedule, began about a year ago. NASCAR has worked on myriad
details, beginning with how to get nearly 200 trucks hauling race
cars and equipment from Michigan International Speedway into Mexico
City.
NASCAR official Tom Bryant has spearheaded the organizational
logistics and made multiple trips to the border crossing in Laredo,
Texas, to meet with customs officials from both nations.
The drive from Michigan to Mexico City is about 40 hours, not
including the tedious customs crossing, where all the equipment and
tools on every NASCAR hauler must be documented on an exhaustive
manifest. Cup Series teams cars were scheduled for a Monday night
arrival at Laredo, with crossing scheduled for Tuesday and arrival
at the track on Thursday.
“It’s been a ton of coordination moving lots of people and lots of
stuff safely and efficiently across a great distance and an
international border,” Bryant said on the “Hauler Talk” NASCAR
podcast.
“There is a lot to it, but the key to it is you just have to define
the problem. We’ve got to get these people and these things from
this point to that point within a certain time period," he said.
"How do we do it in a way that’s going to best position us to be
ready to go to work as soon as we hit the ground down there? Because
this is a pretty tight window.”
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