MEXICO CITY — Hearing the news that NASCAR would be racing in Mexico City, Lance Scott’s initial reaction was similar to many within the Cup Series garage. The Hendrick Motorsports hauler driver, tasked with transporting the equipment necessary to put a car on the track for Kyle Larson each week, was admittedly skeptical.
How would the NASCAR traveling circus be able to haul everything essential to stage the sport’s first international Cup Series race since 1958 and the first-ever in Mexico? The tractor-trailers would be traveling directly from Brooklyn, Mich., site of last Sunday’s race, to Laredo, Texas, where they would then cross the border in a highly coordinated convoy to make their way to the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez circuit in the Mexican capital.
The whole plan had a lot of moving parts, with an itinerary scheduled to the minute. And it’s why Scott, and others, raised eyebrows about whether NASCAR could successfully pull it off.
“At first, no, I didn’t want to do it. Absolutely, I did not want to,” Scott said. “The not-knowing (of) going to Mexico was big. I’ve been to Mexico a couple times, but sitting on the beach drinking beer is a whole lot different than driving 14 hours across there.”
Before long, though, a different attitude took hold — confidence that NASCAR knew the scope of the massive undertaking and had an effective plan in place.
“(The meetings) made you feel really comfortable,” Scott said. “It put (aside) all the anxiousness that I had — and I know I’ve talked to a few of the other (hauler drivers) too. Yeah, I feel a lot better now.”
The Cup haulers went from Brooklyn to Laredo, a 24-hour drive without stops, where they met the tractor-trailers for the second-tier Xfinity Series teams also racing in Mexico but departing from North Carolina. Each hauler then crossed through customs before making the 700-mile trek to Mexico City.
The task of pulling all that off fell to Tom Bryant, NASCAR’s vice president of racing operations, who oversees the logistics of putting on a race weekend, from membership and credentialing to overall operations and safety. But for a task of this magnitude, Bryant’s previous experience is just as important — he served for 21 years in the U.S. Army and helped manage the relocation of troops in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
“Every one of those deployments was with different units, and every one of those appointments had a kind of slightly different mission set,” Bryant said. “… We had to move from place to place over the course of the months that we were there, so you get pretty good at understanding how to plan for and resource and execute a large movement of people and equipment through a denied area safely and effectively.
“Just in general, you have to be comfortable when you approach something like this knowing that you don’t know everything you need to know. You have to be comfortable with ambiguity.”
Last summer, when NASCAR moved toward finalizing a deal to race in Mexico City, Bryant was effectively named the point person. It was his team’s job to figure out how to get every piece of equipment needed to Mexico City and coordinate the transportation of drivers, team members, NASCAR officials, and essential staff. This required numerous meetings with American and Mexican government officials, league executives, the teams, and many other entities.
After nine months of meetings, a plan took shape. This included requiring each hauler, 132 in total, to document its contents in a manifest, a time-consuming endeavor required by customs officials. If a team brings a part across the border, that item must come back. No exceptions.
“Every single thing in those haulers crossing the border has to be accounted for and has to be listed on the manifest,” Bryant said. “All that information has to be submitted to customs authorities for both governments, U.S. and Mexico. And particularly for Mexico, there’s permits associated with it so that all of the equipment is accounted for, all the permits and things that we needed to cross the border and operate in Mexico have been done.”
NASCAR has done something like this before, though on a smaller scale. From 2005 to 2008, the Xfinity Series raced in Mexico City, and some of the plans from that venture were also implemented this time. Some aspects, though, needed an overhaul. For instance, this time, NASCAR arranged all the travel for its Cup and Xfinity teams, whereas last time, each team was responsible for handling its own travel.
“Super, super easy. Different from what we normally do, but well organized. Super well organized,” Front Row Motorsports crew chief Drew Blickensderfer, who served as crew chief in three Xfinity races in Mexico City, said of NASCAR’s previous stint in Mexico. “You knew what was going on. And once you got into the garage area, it felt like any other race weekend. It felt like you were at a race, and the only difference was a lot more people. There were a ton of people there.”
To help manage everything, NASCAR partnered with Private Jet Services, which has worked with various leagues that have held games outside the U.S., and Rock-It Cargo, a global logistics company whose credits include several major events, such as when it moved 200 18-wheeler haulers to Mexico City as part of the Taylor Swift Eras Tour.
Team personnel began making their way to Mexico City midweek. With Xfinity off this past weekend, teams from that series had a relatively straightforward path to get their haulers to Laredo — they left directly from their respective shops. For the Cup teams, the process was more complex.
On Sunday morning at Michigan International Speedway, the garage was a hive of activity — and nothing related to the race later that afternoon. Part of the Mexico City plan called for every team to have a backup hauler carrying its Mexico City racecars arrive at the track from North Carolina. Those cars were then loaded onto the teams’ primary haulers. The U.S. Border Patrol supervised the operation.
Once the race finished, the haulers left for Laredo, each with two drivers. They arrived late Monday, and the hauler drivers then went to a nearby hotel to sleep. The next morning, the border crossing procedure began. Before being permitted into Mexico, every hauler had to drive through an X-ray machine — essentially, the truck equivalent of security screening at an airport.
After crossing, the haulers were divided into 12 packs that left in 20-minute intervals to begin the drive to Mexico City. Accompanying each convoy was a heavy security detail that included the Mexican National Guard. And in case a tractor-trailer suffered a breakdown, the final pack included a tow vehicle.
Multiple rest stops were allotted for each hauler. And because Mexico City officials wanted to avoid a large contingent of trucks driving through the city during rush hour, further clogging the already heavily congested traffic in a city with 21 million people, the schedule was laid out so the haulers would enter the city at off-peak hours. Every hauler was also equipped with a toll responder to help keep things moving.
On Tuesday, the Xfinity haulers rolled into Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez. On Wednesday, the Cup haulers followed. They will remain at the track through the weekend, then they’ll begin the voyage back to the United States. The following weekend, both series race at Pocono Raceway in Pennsylvania, 2,500 miles away.
“Who the hell would want to do it if it was easy?” Bryant said. “If you want it easy, then it’d be no fun.”
(Top photo of NASCAR haulers during a parade before a March race in Las Vegas: Christopher Trim / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
