Ryan Blaney is looking forward to saying “Hola, carril de la victoria!” a week from now. If your Spanish is rusty, that means, “Hello, victory lane!”
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Blaney and the rest of the NASCAR Cup Series will compete June 15 in the Viva México 250 at Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez, a twisting 2.42-mile road course in the heart of Mexico City. It marks the first time the Cup Series has ever raced in Mexico.
If Blaney, who won his first race this season last Sunday at Nashville, sounds excited to venture south of the border, well, that’s because he is!
“I think the atmosphere is gonna be fantastic,” Blaney said Saturday during media availability prior to Sunday’s Cup race at Michigan International Speedway. “Myself, Chase (Elliott), (Mexican native Daniel) Suárez and (Christopher) Bell went down there a couple months ago.
“One of the biggest things I noticed about it was every single media member that was there at the press conference, all the fans walking around, they were very excited for us to come this summer, so that part of it I’m really looking forward to.”
In addition to great food and a different culture than the drivers are used to in the U.S., there are several million racing fans from the Mexico City area who are normally used to Formula One racing or NASCAR Mexico racing. But it’s starting to appear that next Sunday’s race will see a sellout of the 110,000-seat stadium.
“They were very welcoming,” Blaney said. “You never really know what kind of welcome you’re gonna get when you go to a new place anywhere in general. Seeing their excitement really makes us feel good about the fact they’re excited for us to come down and put on a good show. I think it’s gonna be a great hit. I’m really excited to get there next week and it should be a fun one. It should be good.”
Blaney is one of the better road course racers in Cup. Having taken a media ride around the Autódromo when he and his fellow drivers were down there, Blaney already has a rough idea of what to expect. He’s supplementing reading up on and watching videos of the track by running numerous laps on a computer simulator.
Blaney breaks down the course layout
When the green flag drops, Blaney will be ready, he claims. “I think it will race really well, honestly,” Blaney said. “I think there’s a lot of passing zones: obviously into Turn 1, down the long frontstretch is gonna be one, into Turn 4, there’s like a flowy esses section that I don’t know if you’ll see a lot of passing there, just as a normal esses carrying speed.
“Then there’s another braking zone into the stadium, a right-hander that I think you’re gonna see some moves, and then in the stadium there’s a really, really tight left-hander. It’s super tight and it requires a big arc to run it properly, but you’re gonna have guys kind of short cut it and dive in there, almost like the new (Charlotte Motor Speedway) Roval turn.”
Summing it all, Blaney said, “So there’s at least four and then we always find funky ones through there to try to catch people by surprise, so I think it’s gonna race very well.”
The 31-year-old Ohio native was impressed by the facility, saying, “I like the track layout. I think they did a really good job on it. It has all different aspects from high-speed straightaways, really heavy braking zones, flowy sections, and then like your really slow stadium section. I think it has all pieces of road courses that we run kind of mashed into one, so I think it looks like a great racetrack.”
Once the race is over, Blaney hopes to be making history twice: first by winning the inaugural Cup race there, and then by standing atop both victory lane and the Olympic-style three-driver podium that is common at races in Mexico — such as when Formula One races there — which will be used in a NASCAR race for the first time ever.
