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The unprecedented growth of NASCAR
seems to have reached a plateau. Now, it is banking on the Latino audience as part of its next big growth strategy.

Salvador Ruiz is the stuff of dreams for the marketing executives of the National Association for Stock Car Automobile Racing, or NASCAR as it is better known. The 33-year-old native of Mexico’s San Luis Potosí state became hooked on motor sports as a kid watching motocross and off-road racing events with his father, but Ruiz only caught the NASCAR bug when he attended his first stock car race six years ago. The North Hollywood, California air conditioner salesman has since embraced NASCAR with the fervor of a missionary: Ruiz goes to most of the NASCAR-sponsored races held at the California Speedway in nearby Fontana every year, sometimes buying up to 20 tickets at a time to introduce his friends and relatives to the sport. Ruiz’s crusade to spread the NASCAR faith among his fellow Hispanics has been met with mixed results, but he vows to press on. “My brother thinks it’s a sport for Anglo people and I shouldn’t be into it,” says Ruiz. “That’s the way most of my friends see it, but a lot of them have liked it so much they keep coming back.”
And hopefully many more will follow in their footsteps as far as NASCAR is concerned. In the past 15 years stock car racing has enjoyed a remarkable surge in popularity, vaulting past the MLB, pro basketball and the NHL to become the regular season sport with the second-highest television ratings after the NFL. But there are signs that NASCAR’s meteoric ascent may be flattening out—TV ratings for the first six races of the 2007 season were down approximately 14 percent from last year—and its efforts to promote the sport among African Americans have fallen flat.
The importance of wooing the Hispanic market has never been greater for NASCAR, but the recruitment of Mexican drivers and a four-year-old diversity program that grooms future drivers and crewmembers have yielded meager results to date. NASCAR officials estimate that 8.9 percent of their fan base in 2005 was Hispanic, a negligible increase over the 8.1 percent figure for 2001.
“It’s the fastest growing portion of our population, and it’s one of [NASCAR chairman] Brian France’s priorities to make our sport a cross section of America,” says Jim Hunter, NASCAR vice president for corporate communications. “But one of the most difficult things we face is that young people don’t grow up with a car in their hands like they do with a baseball bat or a soccer ball, and it’s going to take us time.”
That’s where Juan Pablo Montoya comes in. The Colombian superstar of the Formula One circuit and winner of the 2000 Indianapolis 500 made his debut as a full-time NASCAR driver in February, and Montoya took his first checkered flag on the circuit a month later at a race in Mexico City. He is not the first top-drawer Latin American to test his skills on the tracks of U.S. stock car racing. Legendary Mexican driver Pedro Rodriguez appeared in his first NASCAR race in 1959 and competed in another four races over a 12-year period.
But in the modern era, no other Hispanic driver has approached the star power of the 31-year-old Montoya, and his impact has been felt from the get-go. His arrival undoubtedly influenced ESPN’s Spanish-language division to start broadcasting NASCAR in 2007, and in Montoya’s first-ever NASCAR race in Memphis last fall, fellow Latin American driver Carlos Contreras spotted a number of topless fans in the grandstands who had painted their torsos in the yellow, blue and red colors of the Colombian flag. “That really impressed me,” says the 36-year-old Mexico City native who has been competing in NASCAR since 1999. “Juan Pablo is a star, and the number of Hispanic fans is going to double because he’s Latino.”
That would represent a major milestone in the evolution of a sport that has long been stereotyped as a weekend pastime for white Southern males. Stock car racing traces its roots to the 1920s when bootleggers in the Deep South souped up their cars in order to elude police at the height of Prohibition. NASCAR became the emblematic sport of the South almost by default: At the time of its founding in 1948, there were no major league sports clubs in any of the former states of the Confederacy. The lily-white complexion of the sport’s drivers and fan base and ubiquitous Confederate flags cemented NASCAR’s image as the ultimate competition for good ol’ boys.
In 2000 NASCAR started taking steps to alter those perceptions under Chairman France’s father Bill France, Jr. with the creation of a diversity council. A program called Drive for Diversity was unveiled three years later to identify young African Americans, Hispanics and women with the potential to become professional drivers and crew members. Now in its fourth season, Drive for Diversity has produced some promising talent such as Jesus Hernandez, a 26-year-old Mexican American from Fresno, California who won two races in the middle-tier NASCAR Dodge Weekly Racing Series last year.
But the program has its share of skeptics. Former NASCAR team co-owner Mike Vazquez helped launch the program but eventually gave up on it as a low-profile, underfunded exercise in tokenism. “I don’t see it as a way to build a fan base,” says the 36-year-old Miamian. “You don’t even have a Drive for Diversity link on NASCAR’s website, and if nobody knows about it, how is it promoting diversity?”
Veteran stock car racing official Jim Hunter acknowledges some of those criticisms as fair. “I often say that golf didn’t go out and find Tiger Woods, it was Tiger who found golf,” he says. “We knew when we started this program that we weren’t going to all of a sudden have a star African-American, Hispanic or female. But we’re going to see some results within the next few years.”
Mexico’s Carlos Contreras claims that the program, which is run by a black-owned company in North Carolina under contract with NASCAR, tries to promote African American prospects over their Latino counterparts. But in the program’s current crop of participants, Hispanic drivers outnumber African Americans by three to two.
NASCAR’s reigning Great Brown Hope has also run afoul of its mandarins in the association’s Daytona Beach, Florida headquarters. Officials slapped Juan Pablo Montoya with a $10,000 fine in April and placed him on probation for the rest of the year after he made an obscene gesture on live television during a practice session at a race track in Phoenix. He expressed regrets about the incident and helped make amends last month when he participated in NASCAR’s first-ever telethon to raise funds for ill children, animal shelters and other charitable causes.
The sport is taking a proactive approach toward Latinos in some strategic locations. NASCAR held its first-ever race on foreign soil in Mexico City in 2005 and currently runs 14 races a year throughout Mexico. For last September’s Nextel Cup Series race at the California Speedway, track officials hired Mexican pop singer Paty Manterola to give a prerace concert as part of a marketing campaign called NASCAR Te Lleva a Las Carreras.
The California Speedway website features a NASCAR 101 primer in Spanish and English, its press releases are now issued in both languages and all new signage that’s been installed at the facility over the past 18 months is bilingual. Track President Gillian Zucker sees Southern California’s extensive Spanish-language media as a key vehicle for reaching Latinos.
“NASCAR is virtually nonexistent in the Hispanic community, and we’ve been working hard to integrate the sport into Spanish-language newspapers and radio stations,” says the 37-year-old New Yorker who moved to California in 2005 and spent four weeks studying Spanish in Cuernavaca, Mexico. “The best people for marketing NASCAR are people who are knowledgeable and passionate about the sport.”
Salvador Ruiz and his growing flock of NASCAR converts would surely say amen to that.