New Mexico
Iconic NASCAR Track Loses 2025 Cup Series Calendar Spot For New Mexico Race
Richmond Raceway will host just one Cup Series race weekend instead of its usual two during the 2025 season after NASCAR confirmed the introduction of Mexico City.
During the announcement, NASCAR executive Ben Kennedy revealed:
“We’re still committed to Richmond. It’s an important track, an important market certainly, as we think about where our NASCAR fans are today.
“We’ve seen some exciting story lines certainly coming out of that track over the past few years and excited to continue to be there next year, put on a great event for our fans, and put a lot of that energy and resources into that event.”
Manuel Velasquez/Getty Images
The inaugural NASCAR Cup Series race in Mexico is set for June 15, 2025, at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez, a track with a rich history in motorsports.
Reflecting on the global vision for NASCAR, Kennedy added:
“This has been on our radar for a long time. We’ve been talking about the continued iteration of our schedule, right? You can go back a few years, went to new markets like Nashville and Austin, Texas.
“We went to the Coliseum for the Clash. … We went to our first street race in downtown Chicago, and this is going to be another first for us in a lot of ways. This is going to be certainly a monumental event for us, the first time we’re going south of the border.”
Kennedy added:
“It’s huge. When we talk as a leadership team about where we feel like our biggest growth opportunities as a sport is, international is always one of the first things that comes up.
“We brought the Craftsman Truck Series to Canada for a number of years, we’ve had the Xfinity Series in Mexico. This is a monumental moment for our sport in the sense that this is our first step of really taking the Cup Series internationally, and I think it could set us up for the future in potential new markets.
“I think we’ve been honest about our interest in taking our Cup Series abroad, whether that’s north of the border or south of the border, and then as we talk about some of our other races, there are opportunities for us to take the Cup Series even further than that.
“So, it’s going to be a big project for us. There’s a lot of questions that we have. I’m sure that the industry will have some questions as well, but excited to take this on, and to go to one of the biggest markets — not just in the country, but in the world — is going to be huge for our sport.”
NASCAR Cup Series: Current Standings
- Tyler Reddick – 823 points
- Kyle Larson – 806 points
- Chase Elliott – 805 points
- Ryan Blaney – 755 points
- William Byron – 743 points
- Christopher Bell – 737 points
- Brad Keselowski – 718 points
- Denny Hamlin – 712 points
- Martin Truex Jr – 695 points
- Ty Gibbs – 676 points
- Chris Buescher – 658 points
- Alex Bowman – 648 points
- Bubba Wallace – 637 points
- Ross Chastain – 631 points
- Joey Logano – 586 points
- Kyle Busch – 552 points
- Daniel Suárez – 527 points
- Chase Briscoe – 514 points
- Austin Cindric – 486 points
- Todd Gilliland – 480 points
- Carson Hocevar – 467 points
- Michael McDowell – 459 points
- Josh Berry – 448 points
- Noah Gragson – 426 points
- Ricky Stenhouse Jr – 404 points
- Erik Jones – 381 points
- Ryan Preece – 368 points
- Daniel Hemric – 365 points
- Austin Dillon – 360 points
- Justin Haley – 356 points
- John H. Nemechek – 343 points
- Corey LaJoie – 335 points
- Zane Smith – 316 points
- Harrison Burton – 306 points
- Kaz Grala – 166 points
- Cody Ware – 98 points
- Joey Hand – 43 points
- Jimmie Johnson – 39 points
- Derek Kraus – 32 points
- David Ragan – 17 points
- Kamui Kobayashi – 8 points
- Will Brown – 6 points
- Cam Waters – 2 points
The governor sets the agenda for the session, including for the budget, so here is what they are looking at so far.
SANTA FE, N.M. — As the regular session of the New Mexico Legislature is set to begin Jan. 20, lawmakers have already filed dozens of bills.
Bills include prohibiting book bans at public libraries and protections against AI, specifically the distribution of sensitive and “Deepfake” images
Juvenile justice reform is, again, a hot topic. House Bill 25 would allow access to someone’s juvenile records during a background check if they’re trying to buy a gun.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham sets the agenda and puts forth the proposed budget lawmakers will address during the session. The governor is calling for lawmakers to take up an $11.3 billion budget for the 2027 fiscal year, which is up 4.6% from current spending levels.
Where would that money go? More than $600 million would go to universal free child care. Meanwhile, more than $200 million would go to health care and to protect against federal funding cuts.
There is also $65 million for statewide affordable housing initiatives and $19 million for public safety.
After years of failure to land a “big fish” business for New Mexico’s economy (or effectively use the oil and gas revenues to grow the economy) Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham with the help of her Economic Development Secretary Rob Black have lured no fewer than three large data centers to New Mexico. These data centers are being built to serve the booming world of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and they will have profound impacts on New Mexico.
It is our view that having these data centers locate in New Mexico is better than having them locate elsewhere. While we have many differences of opinion with this governor, we are pleased to see her get serious about growing and diversifying New Mexico’s oil-dependent economy albeit quite late in her second term.
Sadly, the governor and legislature have chosen not to use broad based economic reforms like deregulation or tax cuts to improve New Mexico’s competitiveness. But, with the failure of her “preferred” economic development “wins” like Maxeon and Ebon solar both of which the governor announced a few years ago, but haven’t panned out, the focus on a more realistic strategy is welcome and long overdue.
Currently, three new data centers are slated to be built in New Mexico:
- Oracle’s Project Jupiter in Santa Teresa with an investment of $165 billion.
- Project Zenith slated to be built in Roswell amounts to a $11.7 billion investment.
- New Era Energy & Digital, Inc. While the overall investment is unclear, the energy requirement is the largest of the three at 7 gigawatts (that’s seven times the power used by the City of San Francisco).
What is a data center? Basically, they are the real-world computing infrastructure that makes up the Internet. The rise of AI requires vast new computing power. It is critical that these facilities have uninterrupted electricity.
That electricity is going to be largely generated by traditional sources like natural gas and possibly nuclear. That contravenes New Mexico’s Energy Transition Act of 2019 which was adopted by this Gov. and many of the legislators still in office. Under the Act electrical power emissions are supposed to be eliminated in a few years.
With the amount of money being invested in these facilities and the simple fact that wind and solar and other “renewable” energy sources aren’t going to get the job done. In 2025 the Legislature passed and MLG signed HB 93 which allows for the creation of “microgrids” that won’t tax the grid and make our electricity more expensive, but the ETA will have to be amended or ignored to provide enough electricity for these data centers. There’s no other option.
New Mexicans have every right to wonder why powerful friends of the governor can set up their own natural gas microgrids while the rest of us face rising costs and decreased reliability from so-called “renewables.” Don’t get me wrong, having these data centers come to New Mexico is an economic boon.
But it comes tempered with massive subsidies including a 30-year property tax exemption and up to $165 billion in industrial revenue bonds. New Mexico is ideally suited as a destination for these data centers with its favorable climate and lack of natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods. We shouldn’t be giving away such massive subsidies.
Welcoming the data center boom to New Mexico better than rejecting them and pushing them to locate in other states. There is no way to avoid CO2 emissions whether they happen here or somewhere else. But, there are questions about both the electricity demand and subsidies that must be addressed as New Mexico’s data center boom begins.
What will the Legislature, radical environmental groups, and future governors of our state do to hinder (or help) bring these data centers to our State? That is an open question that depends heavily on upcoming statewide elections. It is important that New Mexicans understand and appreciate these complicated issues.
Paul Gessing is president of New Mexico’s Rio Grande Foundation. The Rio Grande Foundation is an independent, nonpartisan, tax-exempt research and educational organization dedicated to promoting prosperity for New Mexico based on principles of limited government, economic freedom and individual responsibility
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