NASCAR is bringing its top series to Mexico City next year.
The NASCAR Cup Series will host a regular season race at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodriguez road course on June 15, 2025, marking the first time the racing circuit will have a Cup Series event outside the United States since 1998 when it held the last of three annual races in Japan.
The race also means that drivers will earn points outside of the U.S. for the first time since 1958 when Lee Petty won a race in Toronto. That event was also the top-level debut of his son, iconic driver Richard Petty.
“This is a monumental moment for our sport in the sense that this is our first step of really taking the Cup Series internationally, and I think it could set us up for the future in potential new markets,” Ben Kennedy, NASCAR executive vice president, chief venue & racing innovation officer, said in a press conference. “It’s going to be a big project for us. There’s a lot of questions that we have. I’m sure that the industry will have some questions as well, but excited to take this on, and to go to one of the biggest markets—not just in the country, but in the world—is going to be huge for our sport.”
Although this will be the first event for the top-level series south of the border, NASCAR is no stranger to Mexico. Its second-level tour, the Xfinity Series, ran four races at the same track from 2005 through 2008. That same tour produced one of the main circuit’s stars in Trackhouse driver Daniel Suarez, who was born in Monterrey, Mexico. The Xfinity Series will race the day before the Cup event next season. The circuit also sanctions the Mexico Series, which launched in 2004.
Like most American sports leagues, NASCAR has been looking for ways to expand its international presence in recent years, though the logistics of stock car racing present different challenges outside of American shores when it comes to finding locations with a suitable oval track.
Yet its international goals haven’t stopped efforts to grow domestically, either. NASCAR held its second Chicago street race in June, and it has annually hosted its season-opening exhibition, The Clash at the Coliseum, in Los Angeles. It will also have a new in-season tournament that will air on TNT and Prime Video next year, an idea once conceived by driver/owner Denny Hamlin that also borrows from the NBA’s own concept.
The Cup Series race will air on Prime Video, one of NASCAR’s new media partners that will stream races next year. (TNT Sports also signed on as a broadcast partner, joining incumbents NBC and Fox in the seven-year, $7.75 billion rights agreement.) The Xfinity Series race will air on CW, which picked up rights to the second-level races in a separate seven-year deal for $800 million.
