MEXICO CITY — Somewhere along pit road Sunday at Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez, Jose Blasco-Figueroa will stand in line with his Trackhouse Racing teammates and hear something he’s never heard ahead of a NASCAR Cup race.
The Mexican national anthem.
Just the thought of that had the 52-year-old Mexico City native “getting emotional” when he talked with NBC Sports earlier this month.
But there’s something else that makes the senior performance engineer’s path to this weekend even more special.
He became an American citizen in April.
The first Cup race he heard the “The Star-Spangled Banner” after becoming a U.S. citizen was the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway. Set against the backdrop of Memorial Day weekend, the emotional pre-race ceremonies reached a crescendo with the anthem and flyover.
Blasco-Figueroa admits he “kind of felt different” hearing the anthem as a citizen compared to previous times. “It felt great.”
Just as he imagines what it will be like to hear the Mexican anthem ahead of the first NASCAR Cup points race outside the continental U.S. since 1958.
“Going back there and listening to it, that, to me, is going to be probably the best part of the race regardless of what happens,” he said. “Because … I haven’t heard it (at a Cup race before). I haven’t experienced that.”
Mexico’s Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez is about 7,500 feet above sea level and the thinner air will impact engines.
He is here 25 kilometers from his mother’s home helping oversee engineering aspects for Trackhouse drivers Ross Chastain, Daniel Suarez and Shane van Gisbergen. Each has won a road course race with the Next Gen car (since 2022).
Blasco-Figueroa never imagined his path leading to NASCAR. He didn’t come from a racing family but his interest in the sport was raised when he received a battery-powered toy Formula One car as a child.
Intrigued by how things worked, he became an engineer. He spent his first 23 years in Mexico City and joined General Motors. The company sent him to Michigan for about 18 months before he returned to Mexico. He left GM to earn his master’s degree in England. He hoped to get a job with a Formula One team but nothing materialized.
Blasco-Figueroa returned to work for GM in Mexico. At one point, he was working for GM, teaching automotive engineers and working with a NASCAR Mexico Series team. He eventually quit his GM job to focus on racing. In 2016, he went to Charlotte, North Carolina, dropping his resumes off at race shops. A few days later, he had three job offers.
Some exercised in an oxygen-deprived setting, as seen by Tyler Reddick on a bike at the Toyota Performance Center, and a few slept in hypoxic tents.
He’s worked at BK Racing, Richard Childress Racing and now Trackhouse Racing. He’s working on different projects for Trackhouse and teaching some of the younger engineers
Blasco-Figueroa recently completed the “Data Science and Machine Learning: Making Data-Driven Decisions” 12-week program by the MIT Institute for Data, Systems and Society. He spent eight to 12 hours a week on the course.
“You got to keep up with technology,” Blasco-Figueroa said. “Data science is taking over many things. … AI is just a small part of data science. For us, right here, racing, the amount of data we have is huge.”
“A lot of people just think about racing on the part of you’ve going to make fast cars. Yes, you’ve got to make fast cars, but you got to race, right? That’s why strategy also is a part of the game. How you manage your car, how you manage your tires. All of that is coming into place. We just saw it in the (Coca-Cola) 600. (William Byron) dominated the race. Did he win it? No. We won it (with Chastain). Why? Strategy.”
Should Trackhouse win Sunday in Mexico, it would complete a memorable day for Blasco-Figueroa that started with hearing the Mexican anthem for the first time before a Cup race.
‘It’s on all of us’ | SVPod
