When Daniel Suarez arrived in the United States from Monterrey, Mexico, he barely had anything – “I didn’t have money. I didn’t have friends. I didn’t have connections. And I didn’t speak English, and I couldn’t communicate”. So, he largely navigated the sport alone, which had, at that point, never seen a Mexican-born driver win anything at the Cup level. Sure, he made it eventually. But his point, as told to Kevin Harvick in a recent interview, is that most wouldn’t have.
“I mentioned this to NASCAR in the past, if every driver in the future from Mexico or from Brazil is going to have it as difficult as I had it, 90% of them are not going to make it. So we have to continue to create this path,” Suarez told Kevin Harvickin an interview.
Although NASCAR has had quite a few drivers from Latin America, most of them had already established themselves in other series before arriving. Juan Pablo Montoya, for example, came in as an F1 race winner, a two-time Indianapolis 500 champion, and a CART title holder, with a funded seat at Chip Ganassi Racing waiting for him. And even then, the oval learning curve humbled him. Across seven full-time Cup seasons and 275 starts, Montoya won only twice, and that was both on road courses. He never won on an oval.
But the likes of Suarez had to struggle to get even a part-time role. Coming from NASCAR’s Mexico Division, he wanted to make it big and moved to the United States, and began watching movies to absorb English words and rhythms. But when the “lonely nights” began, they really took a toll on him.
Yet he didn’t give up and made a name for himself, as he went on to win the Xfinity Series championship in 2016 as the first foreign-born driver to win a major NASCAR national series title, and then became the first Mexican-born driver to win a Cup Series race at Sonoma in 2022, his 195th Cup start. It wasn’t until June 2024, after spending a decade in the sport, that he earned American citizenship.
So, now that he has a strong voice within the sport, Suarez feels he can push NASCAR to create a better tunnel for drivers back in Mexico and Brazil. And he drew the clearest analogy to baseball last year: “Why do you think we see a lot of Latinos in baseball? Because there are a lot already. When I got to NASCAR, there wasn’t anyone, so it’s much more difficult. But right now, a path is opening up, a door is opening up, and that’s fundamental.”
The numbers back his argument. Per 2024 data, the Hispanic population in the United States sat at around 65 million, with a U.S. Latino economy larger in GDP than all but five countries worldwide. Of Hispanic males, 94% identified as sports fans, and more than half, 56%, were “avid” fans who attended sporting events about twice as often as other demographics.
The figures are sure to have shot up by now, and yet NASCAR’s leaving one of the most sports-hungry demographics in America largely untapped, despite the NFL’s strong example.
Still, as Suarez continued in his conversation with Harvick, “So, Mexico, I feel like you can grab a driver from here, put him in ARCA, and he or she is going to be competitive”.
The situation in Mexico still looks better. The drivers do have a taste for oval racing, and with NASCAR making a return to the country for the first time in decades last year, the overall popularity has increased. The young drivers from the country have better facilities. However, the situation in Brazil is quite the opposite.
“In Brazil, the cars are completely different. It’s almost like a little sports car. Eventually, that is going to change. I have talked to the people from Brazil, eventually they want to change that, but the NASCAR series in Brazil has been only around for a couple of years. So it’s still very new,” he added.
But Daniel Suarez also proposed a very practical solution for this.
“The first thing is to, just like Mexico is doing right now, implement 100% the rules that we have here. Implement the rules, and then once you understand the rules, how it works, how physical it is, now you [start] having opportunities over here. Maybe you do a few tests in Late Models so you can understand how it works, and then you do a race in ARCA, and you do well, you start getting a few more races, and then eventually you go to trucks. But always, but always with a path,” he added.
One of the major issues that Brazil faces, as Suarez described, is the lack of racing experience on ovals and in stock cars. A majority of the country’s population is more inclined towards open-wheel racing, thanks to the Formula 1 Grand Prix in São Paulo and its history with drivers like Ayrton Senna and Nelson Piquet.
If NASCAR were to implement the ARCA Series races or even Late Model runs as Suarez suggests, it would make the younger generation more accustomed to stock racing, and perhaps, we will see more international drivers in the future joining the Cup Series.
There have been some remarkable drivers from Brazil, including Miguel Paludo. He ran the Truck Series full-time between 2011 and 2013 and pulled off quite a few impressive results. However, after not finding a seat for 2014, he returned to his country and began participating in the Porsche GT3 Cup series, reverting to his roots. Similar to what Suarez said, the country has much better infrastructure for sports car series than stock cars.
But the question arises: if Formula 1 can travel all the way from Europe to race in Brazil, why can’t NASCAR? There is actually a very reasonable answer to this, and it really sits in the sport’s structuring and scheduling.
Why can’t NASCAR move around internationally like F1?
Every other major American league has found a way to go international. The NFL has nine games lined up across seven countries this season. The NBA, MLB, and NHL have been staging games abroad for years. NASCAR? It held one Cup race in Mexico City in 2025, only the third time in 77 years the series had raced outside the United States, and that was considered a historic moment. And it isn’t entirely due to a lack of ambition.
NASCAR runs 38 Cup races in a season, with barely any breathing room between them. F1 does 24 races over nine months and builds in a multi-week summer break. So, shipping F1 cars to Brazil is a very different operation from moving 40 stock cars, haulers, motorhomes, and an entire garage infrastructure across an ocean every other weekend.
“We have the individual series and our philosophy has always been, we know we can’t take the Cup Series and have it travel around like Formula One does, so if we can go into a market and create local stars, local heroes, local team owners, local track infrastructure, that’s good for us,” Chad Seigler, CIO, once mentioned.
But Seigler also mentioned that NASCAR already runs international series in Mexico, Canada, Brazil, and Europe. The Cup cars may not travel there, but the sport does, in some form. And that is the framework Suarez is pushing to strengthen. Not a Cup race in São Paulo, but a proper developmental ladder there, with a structure that means talented young Brazilian or Mexican drivers get a shot that doesn’t ask too much of them.
Now, it remains to be seen how the new CEO, Steve O’Donnell, takes this forward, who had said earlier this year that “NASCAR is open to everybody”.
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