When Gilbert Ornelas was growing up in Fontana, he could hear the engines’ roar from what was then the California Speedway, where NASCAR has raced since 1997.
Twenty years ago, Ornelas did not fit the profile of the average NASCAR fan, but that has changed. He’s all in — originally a Jimmie Johnson fan (California guy, drives a Chevrolet) and more recently following Mexican driver Daniel Suarez.
“Come on — how many Mexicans are in NASCAR? And he is driving a Toyota, and I am not a Toyota fan. Look at what I am sacrificing to be with this guy! But if this guy wins a championship, it is going to draw a lot of Mexicans into it,” he said in a telephone interview. He says he will still follow Johnson as well.
Ornelas, 35, recently married, living in La Habra and working as a freight forwarding operator, said he plans to be at the Monster Energy Cup Series Auto Club 400 race March 18 at what is now the Auto Club Speedway in Fontana. Fortunately for Ornelas, the race is scheduled a few days before he and wife Jessica start their honeymoon.
Whether he knows it or not, Ornelas has his own fan following.
The folks at Auto Club Speedway have been working for at least a decade to make the NASCAR event inviting for Latinos, who make up more than 49 percent of San Bernardino County’s population and more than 45 percent of Riverside County, the majority of Mexican origin.
This year’s “The Fastest Sunday of the Year” marketing campaign for the long race weekend, is “threading the needle” between engaging traditional core NASCAR fans and trying to entice a new audience to the events, promoters say.
NASCAR in recent years has been struggling with decreasing Nielsen ratings on television, and fewer fans in the seats on race days across the nation. The Fontana track has taken its lumps along with other venues across the country.
From 2004-2010, there were two annual NASCAR races at the track. Now it’s one race, but the remaining March date appears to sell out or come close but with a lower capacity after the grandstand was reduced to 68,000 from 92,000 seats. Such seat reductions have taken place at other tracks around the country in recent years.
Attendance strength is anecdotal. International Speedway Corporation, which owns or operates 13 racetracks across the country, does not release figures.
The effort to get more fans watching at home and filling seats at the raceway is aimed at a younger demographic, said Josh Avila, senior director of consumer marketing for Auto Club Speedway.
“The Fastest Sunday of the Year” marketing poster for 2018 brings forward all of the long weekend’s attractions surrounding the race, including food, entertainment and lucha libre that leads up to the 12:30 pm Sunday race time, he said in a telephone interview.
The brightly colored movie-style graphic gives a nod to the race with a large image of a helmeted driver and a small down-page logo, but the big words focus on what Avila calls the “sensory overload’ of the event, an entire weekend of food and entertainment.
Avila said lucha libre, with masked freestyle wrestlers such as Blue Demon Jr. who are superstars in Mexico, has been a feature of the pre-race events for several years, and events appealing to Hispanic families go back about a decade.
Food offerings include King Taco as well as Pink’s Hot Dogs. Entertainment lineups include a Viva La Fiesta stage — last year it featured Mariachi Los Reyes– and the honorary starter for 2017 was Grammy-winning singer Pepe Aguilar
“We did a little bit of research, and there is a current non-fan who, when they attend the race, they are blown away by it,” said Jose R. Villa, the president and chief strategy officer of cross-cultural marketing agency Sensis, which was brought to create the 2018 campaign.
Introduced to NASCAR in 2011 at the urging of his future brother-in-law, Ornelas said he was drawn in by the action.
“Once I saw the race, I was hooked,” he said in a telephone interview. “Once I saw the cars — it was a spectacle, it was really intriguing,” echoing Villa’s observation.
Orneals goes to events with his brother-in-law and two others, but Ornelas said he is the only one in his immediate family that follows NASCAR.
“They ridicule me — they don’t like it at all. My brothers are all sports guys and they will say stuff — but you can tell they are interested. They have to watch it for themselves…you are not going to learn it in a day.”
There will be an across-the-board campaign, from social media to radio to television, as well as billboards and posters, to alert longtime fans and draw in new ones, Villa said.
“There is an openness by millennials,” for such events, Villa said. “We just need to get them out to that first race,” and turn it into what he called an “iconic event,” where the emphasis is on the entire experience, not just the race.
And while the campaign wants to get every possible fan through the gate, “millennial in Southern California skews Hispanic,” Villa said.
“NASCAR is doing the right thing. It just makes sense,” said Inez M. González, director of the Latino Communications Institute at Cal State Fullerton. “Any business that wants to see growth will target and young and diverse audience, and Latinos are the largest of the racial/ethnic groups.”
And they are younger. A 2016 Pew Research Center analysis concluded nearly six in 10 Hispanics are millennials, or younger. In the Riverside-San Bernardino market, the top radio station is Spanish-language KLYY-FM, one of the four Spanish-language stations in the area’s top 10 stations.
In 2016, Latino buying power was $1.4 trillion, nearly 10 percent of total U.S. buying power for that year, according to a report by the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia.
NASCAR’s “long-term strategy has been to welcome Latinos,” González said. She compared Suarez’s presence in the circuit to the Los Angeles Dodgers introduction of pitcher Fernando Valenzuela in 1980, “having a winner that Latinos can identify with.”
She also said Latinos, if attracted, will bring their families with them, “so it’s a smart move.”
There is one cross-cultural element: Ornelas texted that his wife Jessica “has to put up with me and my NASCAR obsession.”
