Max Gutierrez stood just outside the walls of the Los Angeles Coliseum and gaped through the archway at the field below. He couldn’t fathom it — there will be a race track in there, atop that grass, inside that iconic stadium, and he’ll be racing on it.

He walked toward the field, going under the arch and inside toward the famous stairs that lead down to the playing surface, which on this day in December was a soccer pitch.

Few venues boast a history like the Los Angeles Coliseum. The president has spoken there, the pope has performed Mass there, Olympians have triumphed there, the Dodgers have played there. For the last two years, NASCAR Cup Series stars have raced there. And now Gutierrez will join that list as the NASCAR Mexico Series will compete in a race NASCAR sees as a huge step in its push to become more international.

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Gutierrez paused and looked around, imagining thousands of fans filling those seats as Mexico drivers race in the King Taco La Batalla en El Coliseo on Feb. 3 at 10:30 p.m. ET  after the Busch Light Clash (8 p.m. ET, FS1). He walked closer, stopping at a TV camera at the top of the stairs to get a quick tutorial from the cameraman who was there hours before a soccer match between Gutierrez’s beloved Mexico and Colombia.

Eventually, Gutierrez, his cousin, William Said, fellow driver Regina Sirvent and NASCAR staffers walked down those stairs and onto the field, where the soccer players warmed up.

Asked what he was thinking now that he was down on the field, right where he will be racing, he pointed to a corner and said, “I can put someone in the wall there …”

He spun counterclockwise and pointed to the next corner.

“… and put someone in the wall there.”

He was kidding.

Mostly.

A little.

Or maybe not at all.

•   •   •

NASCAR has gone international. For most of its life, the sport that started out as Strictly Stock was strictly American. All of the drivers were American, and all of the races were in the United States. But that started to change early this century. The Xfinity Series raced in Mexico City in the mid 2000s and Montreal from 2007-2012. Colombian driver Juan Pablo Montoya and Australian Marcos Ambrose had full-time Cup Series rides for roughly that same time span.

With the opening last year of NASCAR Brazil, NASCAR now co-owns or licenses its name to four international series — the others are NASCAR Canada (2007), the NASCAR Whelen Euro Series (2012) and NASCAR Mexico (2004).

“There’s the whole rest of the world out there,” says Chad Seigler, NASCAR’s chief international officer — and apparently there are already a ton of NASCAR fans in it. Recent NASCAR races in London and Mexico City have drawn 40,000-plus fans, and 30,000 fans showed up for a race in Brazil.

“Those are big numbers. What that tells us is there is a passion for our style of racing,” Seigler says. “We also see there’s a passion for Americana, that love of the car and love of the race car.”

As those series have grown, there has been a concurrent expansion of NASCAR’s international footprint. Garage 56, NASCAR’s entry into Le Mans, was the talk of that event last summer. New Zealander Shane van Gisbergen won the Chicago Street Race last summer and will compete in Craftsman Trucks, Xfinity and Cup races this year. Daniel Suárez, a Mexican driver who cut his teeth in the NASCAR Mexico Series, won the Xfinity Series championship in 2016 and has been a full-time Cup driver ever since. He’ll compete in both the King Taco La Batalla and the Busch Light Clash.

And Kyle Larson, a Japanese American driver and graduate of NASCAR’s Drive for Diversity class of 2012, won the Cup championship in 2021 and is considered a transcendent talent no matter what race car he climbs into.

Five years ago, Seigler says, NASCAR had one, maybe 1.5, employees dedicated to the international market. Now there are 10-plus, including one dedicated solely to exploring new markets and another dedicated solely to developing drivers.

“We look at it on several fronts. The obvious one is growing the NASCAR brand and NASCAR exposure outside of the U.S.,” Seigler says. “Our approach to it is a little different from other sports leagues. We don’t look at it as we want to take one event into a region, race it there, leave and then come back next year. Our philosophy has always been centered around creating series within a region or a country, creating an infrastructure, creating a knowledge of NASCAR, creating race teams and drivers and developing talent in those specific regions.”

•   •   •

Regina Sirvent, who has won two races in Mexico’s trucks series and is a member of NASCAR’s Drive for Diversity class, attended the 2021 Busch Clash at the Coliseum as a fan. She also served as an ambassador for NASCAR to talk about the sport to kids from the Boys and Girls Club. Standing outside the Coliseum in December, she recalled watching those stock cars barrel their way around the quarter-mile track. She told herself then that one day she’d get to race there.

“And now, it’s a reality,” she says. “We have a ton of young fans, and hopefully they’ll get inspired by my story or someone else’s story.”

Sirvent, who won a fan vote for entry into the race, is proud of the fact she’ll be the first woman to race a stock car at the Coliseum, and she embraces the opportunity to be a role model for girls with big dreams.

“Since I started racing NASCAR, one of my main focuses was to tell girls that you’re not going to win all the time, you’re not going to lose all the time,” she says. “The most important thing is to try — and learn from your mistakes. If you learn from your mistakes, you’ll become a great driver.”

As Gutierrez and Sirvent walked around the stadium — turning a lap on foot outside, 50 days before they would turn one inside in a stock car — they passed a Toyota Camry painted to look like a race car.

More than an hour before a ceremonial groundbreaking event celebrating the metamorphosis of the field to a race track, a worker held a bottle of Windex in one hand and a cloth in the other as he worked to make the car glisten.

That displayed extraordinary attention to detail, especially considering he was working on the side of the car facing the stadium, which almost nobody would see, and the car wasn’t even part of the event.

That little detail hints at how big of a deal the King Taco La Batalla is. NASCAR sees it as a chance to tap a key market — Los Angeles has the second-largest population of Mexicans in North America, behind only Mexico City.

But the venue can’t just look pretty. The product — meaning the race and the people driving in it — has to be good, which partially explains Gutierrez’s avowed willingness to rub fenders to win. The rest of the explanation is he wants to win, period, big race, small race, Los Angeles, Mexico City, on tricycles in his driveway, wherever.

One of the biggest challenges NASCAR faces when launching a new series is the balance between staying true to the NASCAR brand while at the same time embracing the local racing ethos. The sport’s history of fender-to-fender, aggressive racing is crucial to its identity, and a big part of its appeal to drivers, sponsors and fans. The key is making sure that translates to a new market.

In Mexico, that’s not a problem. Gutierrez says if anything, Mexican race car drivers are more aggressive than American race car drivers. But the racing culture in Europe is different because of the influence of the FIA. Early in the NASCAR Whelen Euro Series’s life, drivers were warned not to use their fenders to move competitors out of the way and that any intentional contact would be penalized. But that has loosened in recent seasons.

“We talk about it all the time,” Seigler says. “And it is a fine balance. We always tell people going into the market that we feel confident educating people and showing people what we believe NASCAR-style racing is. With that said, we’re always going to be very cognizant of what the local culture and officiating side wants to see.”

What’s next for NASCAR’s international push? Holding a Cup Series race outside of the United States sits high atop the sport’s to-do list. Wherever that race is, it will be in a market in which the sport already has a presence. And it won’t necessarily be on an existing track. One benefit of NASCAR’s recent willingness to try new things with its schedule — racing on dirt at Bristol, on a street course in Chicago, and on a temporary track at the Coliseum — is those efforts have shown the sport can go anywhere and put on a good race.

As for the next region that might see a NASCAR series, nothing is imminent; finding likely candidates is as easy as looking at a map. Asia, the Middle East and Australia are all on NASCAR’s radar.

In 10 or 15 years, Seigler wants the sport to be ready to create what he calls a Champion’s League. In his vision, all the international series — however many there are by then — will run the same cars, and drivers from the different series will race against each other in what amounts to an international all-star series.

As those series develop drivers, Seigler says the industry needs to create pathways for them to go Cup racing if they want, much like Suárez has.

For years, NASCAR’s drivers came mostly from the Southeast. Now they come from all over the United States. Two years ago, a record seven foreign-born drivers competed in the race at Watkins Glen. Long-term, Seigler imagines walking the grid at the Daytona 500 and seeing drivers from all over the world climbing into their cars.

All of this opens huge sponsorship options for teams, drivers and the leagues themselves.

Dollars, yen, pounds, pesos — sponsors aren’t picky, they’ll pay in all of it.

•   •   •

As a young driver, Gutierrez raced on the same team as Suárez. He watched him closely and learned an important lesson: “He was the most selfish driver. He wanted to win,” he says. “You have to be selfish. You have friends at the track. But it doesn’t matter.”

The application of that lesson is that he expects the race at the Coliseum to be barren of friendships. “Everybody’s going to be like, I’m going to win. If I’m in second place on the last lap, I’m going to spin you out. It’s going to be way aggressive. For the fans, they’re going to love it.”

He meant that as a hypothetical. Asked if he would spin someone out to win, he smiled sheepishly.

“Yes … no … what?” as if he was desperate to change the subject. But he couldn’t keep a straight face so he confessed: “Absolutely, yes. I want to win.”

Sirvent was slightly less committal. Like Gutierrez, she expects the race to be an aggressive, beating and banging slugfest, of which she will be a more than willing participant. “I’m not going to say I’m going to be wrecking people,” she said. “But I’m going to say I’ll be as aggressive as I need to be. If they don’t want to respect me because it’s a short track, I’ll make them respect me.”

Gutierrez said Mexican drivers’ desire to win the race is the rough equivalent of wanting to win the championship. Aside from bragging rights, there is the obvious boon to a career from winning on such a big stage. Sponsors want to be affiliated with drivers who win big races.

So do fans.

An interesting wrinkle in NASCAR’s international strategy is in its star-making goals. NASCAR does not want to make, say, Kyle Larson and Ryan Blaney superstars in Mexico. It wants to make Mexican drivers superstars in Mexico (and Brazilian drivers in Brazil, Canadian drivers in Canada, etc.)

“If you were going into Mexico City tomorrow and asked who’s your favorite NASCAR driver, I would be thrilled if they said it’s Regina Sirvent or Max Gutierrez because that tells me they are locked in, and when they think of NASCAR, they think of those drivers,” Seigler says.

In pursuing that goal, NASCAR is following the same model it used at the Cup level: identifying young drivers as stars in the making and promoting them aggressively. That’s why NASCAR flew Gutierrez and Sirvent from Mexico City and Charlotte, respectively, to Los Angeles for the soccer game.

Both are young and overflowing with charisma. They talked easily with reporters, switching from English to Spanish based on how the question came to them. They laughed and joked with each other, with writers, with NASCAR staffers and with fans.

Sirvent was recognized by fans as she stood on the field before the game and later as she watched from an open-air suite. A woman in the next suite over got her attention. Her 5-year-old son is the proud new owner of a go-kart. His first race had been a week earlier, and he recognized Sirvent and wanted to meet her.

Sirvent posed for pictures, gave him her NASCAR scarf, and offered him advice: Come back and watch the stock cars race here. It’s going to be a great race.

And a historic one, too.