Overnight from Thursday to Friday, an Instagram account of some renown posted about garage rumors that NASCAR could race on the Daytona Road Course should the new event at Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez in Mexico City on June 13-15 get canceled.
The account does post a lot of things that I hear too but there’s a lot of things that get talked about in the garage that contain partial truths or the game of telephone twists the truth a little bit.
Anyway, this is the nugget from that Instagram account.
“Cup and Xfinity garage, the rumor is spreading quick that NASCAR may not be going to Mexico this year after all. Instead we could be seeing more racing on the Daytona Road Course that weekend instead of Mexico City. I’ve even heard that some teams are already looking to book hotel rooms in Daytona for that weekend.”
That is a rumor that has been floating around.
For example, a Truck Series team PR rep first asked me the question post-race at Atlanta Motor Speedway last month and it’s a rumor I hadn’t heard by that point. I shrugged it off and said I would at least inquire.
Later that day, before the Xfinity Series race, I asked a Cup Series team manager and was told ‘I heard that too,’ but that ‘nothing concrete’ and it was ‘something some hauler drivers were talking about.’
From there, I shrugged it off. In my mind, I just assumed, sure, as economic tensions mount between the United States and Mexico, it’s plausible that a contingency plan would need to be made if it is no longer tenable to race at Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez. But there is so much money being invested, and so much money to be made, that it’s hard to see this race logically not happening.
A few days later, a short track spotter who would be used as a secondary spotter at the event, suggested to be that he heard it inside a Cup garage, and that a team owner said ‘it’s a real possibility from what he gathered.’
Okay, so now I’m hearing it repeatedly: I text two high level Cup Series people about it, with one saying ‘it’s possible but unlikely’ and another saying the rumor ‘doesn’t have no legs but has been wildly overblown.’
For what it’s worth, NASCAR sent Chase Elliott, Ryan Blaney, Daniel Suarez and Christopher Bell to Mexico City to walk around the facility and take in a lucha libre event in advance of the event. NASCAR says the event is ‘unequivocally happening’ and is full steam ahead in its preparation.
NASCAR has a two-year deal to race at the track with co-promoters OCESA, a major events organizer, who also manages the Formula 1 Grand Prix at the venue.
At the same time, NASCAR no doubt has a contingency plan for what it would do if the race at Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez suddenly becomes untenable and recent pandemic era history suggests it would be the Daytona Road Course, as was the case in 2020 and 2021.
It’s likely that someone in the garage heard that contingency plan and took it as NASCAR expecting to implement that plan. It became a game of telephone.
So anyway, I write this to tell you that sometimes reporting involves things that you never hear about because in the case of this rumor, I wasn’t going to legitimize it when everything pointed to it being nothing more than a contingency plan.
But the account posting the rumor led to several us in the beat corps reporting what we had heard, responsibly. That is the name of the game in the media center sometimes.
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.
