Suarez carries Mexican banner
He’s come a long way from Monterrey to NASCAR’s top rung
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Daniel Suarez wore a suit but ditched the tie the first time he spoke at the White House. The classy, yet casual, attire seemed to fit the moment for a speech in front of about 150 Latino students not much younger than him.
Suarez was invited to talk as part of President Barack Obama’s My Brother Keeper’s initiative, designed to help young people stay on track and think broadly about their future.
Growing up in Monterrey, Mexico, where Suarez’s love of cars blossomed as he tagged along at his father’s auto-restoration shop, the White House may as well have been as far away as the moon. He loved karting and VW Beetles and dreamed of racing stock cars at Autodromo in Mexico.
Those moments flashed for Suarez before he addressed the kids last October. He was still just a relatively unknown — at least in the United States — Xfinity Series driver, a month away from being crowned NASCAR’s El Campeon. Two months away from landing the NASCAR ride of a lifetime.
Speaking English that he taught himself from years of watching American movies and cartoons, Suarez kept his topic to one he knows best.
“All the time that I need to talk to new kids in a new generation,” the 25-year-old Suarez said, “the only thing I try to tell them is a little bit of my story.”
Suarez, will make his first career start in NASCAR’s elite racing series today at the Daytona 500 is akin to, say, Dale Earnhardt Jr. at Daytona when he returns home to Mexico.
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto tweeted in Spanish to Suarez, and called him “a pride for Mexico and Latin America.” Weeks after Suarez became NASCAR’s first foreign-born champion, he was greeted in early December with a rock-star reception at a parade in Mexico City. He
was mobbed by screaming fans chanting “Dani! Dani! Dani!” and was stopped every step or two for a selfie or to sign autographs. Suarez waved a Mexican flag, addressed the faithful fans over a public address system, and had few moments to spare and think about how life could get any better as his country’s racing hero.
Suarez snared a good car, too, ready to ride with a JGR team that fell just 10 laps shy of winning a championship last season. Suarez is in demand, as well, as the fresh Mexican face with the carefree attitude NASCAR is counting on to diversify its fan base and bring Latinos to the tracks and their televisions.
Suarez is all energy, answering reporters’ questions in both English and Spanish, his sentences all seeming to need an exclamation point.
Around the Daytona infield, flags fly from campers not just for Junior and Jimmie Johnson, but for President Donald Trump and the confederacy. NASCAR took a whopping PR hit last year when CEO Brian France publicly endorsed Trump — who has called Mexicans criminals and promised to erect a wall along the Mexican border — and the good ol’ boy image still hasn’t faded even as the sport evolved into one with an $8.2 billion television TV deal.
Suarez was welcome at the White House under Obama. With Trump in charge, politics gets thorny for a young man still finding his way in the States.
“Like everything, when I went racing in Mexico, I had a lot of people that liked me, I had a little bit of people that didn’t like me,” Suarez said. “Here, that’s exactly how it works. It doesn’t matter what you do. The little bit of people that don’t like you won’t change it and they’ll be bad.
“I can tell you something, I feel more than ever, super proud to be Mexican and represent the people in Latin America.”
XFINITY: Ryan Reed picked up the second Series victory of his career — both at Daytona International Speedway — by winning the wreck-filled season-opener Saturday.
Reed held off Austin Dillon and Kasey Kahne in a two-lap overtime shootout to win in a Ford for Roush Fenway Racing.
Reed’s only other career victory came in this race in 2015.