Pitbull on all the forces — and people — that inspired him to invest in a NASCAR team

There are a whole host of reasons why reggaeton and Latin rap star Pitbull decided to cross over into professional sports by becoming an ownership partner for new NASCAR team Trackhouse Racing — and, to be sure, there were a whole host of people who led him down this particular path.

Among those people, he says, is a Cuban-American family of entrepreneurs with deep roots in the Charlotte area. Another, he explains, is a Huntersville-based woman who is a longtime producer of TV series and documentaries about the sport.

The only full-time Mexican driver in NASCAR’s top series played a critical role.

And, in their own small way, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman did, too.

We’ll get to all of them. But first, a quick refresher for those still catching up:

It’s been almost three weeks since Pitbull — neé Armando Pérez, aka “Mr. Worldwide” — was announced as a co-owner of Trackhouse Racing, joining team founder/co-owner/former driver Justin Marks and newly hired Mexican driver Daniel Suárez, who will be at the wheel of the No. 99 Chevrolet for the team’s inaugural Cup season in 2021.

The announcement turned heads because it would be a prominent pairing of a Latino driver and team owner. Even more so, though, it was remarkable because it was the second time in less than four months that a non-racing celebrity said they had become an owner of a NASCAR team, with the 40-year-old Pérez following on the heels of his friend Michael Jordan into the sport.

(Jordan, who already is the majority owner of the NBA’s Charlotte Hornets, agreed in September to become the majority owner of a NASCAR Cup Series team, 23XI, that will be led by Bubba Wallace, the series’ lone Black driver.)

Here’s an overview of the pivotal factors — and people — that led to Pérez’s decision to make the leap.

The movie that planted the seed

On Jan. 15, Pérez launched into his tweet announcing that he’d become a co-owner of Trackhouse by stating: “I’ve been a fan of the @NASCAR story since the movie ‘Days of Thunder’ ... ”

Released in 1990, when Cruise was 27 and Kidman was 23, “Days of Thunder” — portions of which were filmed in Charlotte — packaged a story about a reckless, rising NASCAR star in a flashy action flick that didn’t fare well with critics. (Lawrence Toppman, The Observer’s film critic at the time, called it “a stock movie about stock car racing.”)

But the movie scored with audiences, eventually raking in close to $160 million at the box office, and turned some who saw it onto the sport.

Pérez included. He was 9-1/2 when “Days of Thunder” came out, although he says he didn’t see it until he was closer to 10, because he grew up in poverty in his hometown of Miami and had to wait for the film to make its way to the dollar theaters, into which he and his friends would sneak their own popcorn and RC Cola.

“It was a great experience,” Pérez told The Observer by phone Tuesday, of his memory of watching the film.

“I was like, ‘Wow, man, look at everything that it goes into.’ Example: When they spoke about how they utilized each others’ cars to be able to swing by each other in a certain draft. As a little kid watching that I’m like, ‘Oh, wow, so you can make a car even faster by being able to utilize the guy out in front of you.’

“And ... it was a great obviously love story between Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, but also a great love story between Tom and the racing partner that he was always against — you know, when they were in the wheelchairs and trying to race in the hospital, and when they both rented a car and they raced on their way to the meeting. It was a great movie all about adversity, being an underdog — which I relate to 150,000% — and more than anything, being a winner. Not only on the racetrack, but in life.”

The seed had been planted. Auto racing didn’t really start seeping into his life, however, until he was grown up and famous.

The right people at the right times

One of the earliest brushes Pérez had with the sport came roughly a decade ago, thanks to his connection to the Sabates family.

Entrepreneur Art Sabates, back then, owned the Shops on the Green shopping center in Cornelius; his older brother, Jose Sabates, is a businessman, too, and in 2005 was key in helping broker the original deal that brought a NASCAR-sanctioned race to Mexico for the first time ever; and their oldest brother, Felix Sabates, was a longtime motorsports owner best-known in Charlotte as the man with his name on multiple car dealerships.

The Sabateses, like Pérez’s parents, were refugees who escaped Cuba.

They were important in all of this because Art and Jose are the ones who introduced Pérez to Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Domit (aka Carlos Slim Jr.).

And that, Pérez says, led to conversations between him and Slim Domit about Daniel Suárez, who back then was a teenager from Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico, and a rising star in the sport, having won the NASCAR PEAK Mexico Series’ Rookie of the Year award in 2010.

Eventually, Art and Jose Sabates introduced Pérez to Suárez, and over the next decade the Sabateses would set up additional informal meet-ups between the two backstage at Pérez’s concerts.

Not once, though, Pérez says, did the possibility of doing something NASCAR-related with Suárez come up.

“He was ... just basically asking advice on how to continue to persevere,” Pérez recalls of their interactions, again pointing out: “Not only in NASCAR but just in life — due to our backgrounds being something very similar. ... But no, the opportunity to partner up with him in NASCAR never came about.”

At the same time, Pérez was already on the way to building a vast and diverse empire.

He had started his own record label, called “Mr. 305,” and was using Miami as a home base for business ventures that include a stake in both the Miami Subs chain, his own line of vodka, and a chain of tuition-free public charter schools called SLAM! (The first Sports Leadership Arts and Management school was founded in Miami in 2013; the concept since has spread across the country.)

Pérez also says he has “always wanted to be a team owner one way or another, no matter the sport,” and in 2017 he joined a group that was trying to buy Major League Baseball’s Miami Marlins, which eventually were sold to an investment group co-led by Baseball Hall of Famer Derek Jeter.

Meanwhile, Pérez says, over the years there were “people always sprinkling the idea” of his getting involved with NASCAR.

And 2020 was the year he got serious.

‘This came together pretty fast’

In early March of last year, right before COVID hit, Pérez walked the red carpet with country star Blake Shelton at Phoenix Raceway in Arizona. The pair went on to perform their single “Get Ready” — a mash-up of pop and country — for the crowd gathered at the FanShield 500, and marked a rare occasion for a sport not known for featuring non-whites in its pre-race concerts.

He says that was only the second time he’d been to a track.

Then in June, he showed up virtually on the video board at Homestead-Miami Speedway to do the intro for the Dixie Vodka 400, as part of a push by NASCAR to engage with fans of diverse backgrounds and broaden its audience.

Still, though, Pérez says he had no idea yet that he might buy into a race team.

He says it didn’t crystallize for him until late December, barely a few weeks before the announcement was made.

He was in North Carolina, just before New Year’s Eve, and was having a conversation with Pam Miller, a longtime producer of NASCAR coverage for Fox Broadcasting who is based in Huntersville — and who earlier in December struck a deal with CBS Sports to be a producer of a Saturday-night racing series set to launch this summer.

“I was talking to her about what NASCAR meant to the kids when they first saw it here in SLAM! in Miami eight years ago,” Pérez said during a joint press conference with Daniel Suárez and Trackhouse co-owner Justin Marks on Tuesday, explaining that SLAM! had arranged to have a real NASCAR car parked out in front of the school when it opened. And “she was talking to me about a documentary she was working on.”

Eventually, he said, they started “talking about different ways to be able to educate the public on NASCAR and hearing about how they wanted to diversify as far as when it came to culture, utilizing the sport on bringing everybody together.”

Miller, by the way, was one of the producers of a 2019 documentary titled “Blink of an Eye,” which chronicles NASCAR driver Michael Waltrip’s career and his relationship with Dale Earnhardt. It’s a film that, like “Days of Thunder,” inspired Pérez. “I respect ... what those drivers go through, how they have to be so mentally fit, that — no matter what — look at it and go, ‘We’re going to get through this one way or another,’ ” Pérez said during Tuesday’s press conference. “That is the sign of a true champ.”

By the end of the conversation, Miller decided she would connect Pérez to Marks and the team that was starting up Trackhouse with Suárez.

A week later, Pérez, Marks and Suárez were sitting together in Atlanta.

As far as their conversation went, Pérez said, “it wasn’t just we have to have a winning team, we got to do the sponsorship, got to create this. I was like, ‘Look, we’re going to do that, OK? Really what this is about is this: How do we make this something more powerful? How do we make this so it’s historical and how do we make this so we break barriers, boundaries, limits, bringing everybody together through this?’”

From there, Pérez told The Observer, “this came together pretty fast.”

“I just felt that we were on — not only on the same page — same paragraph, same sentence.”

‘Why dream when you can live it?’

A big part of the attraction for Pérez, of course, was the opportunity to expand the Latino fan base Suárez already has.

Theirs is the highest-profile pairing of a Latino driver and team owner in the sport since Juan Pablo Montoya, a Colombian, drove for Chip Ganassi Racing — when it was part-owned by none other than Felix Sabates.

And it comes at a turning point for the sport in terms of diversity, thanks to his entry into the fray but also to Michael Jordan’s investment in NASCAR and Bubba Wallace.

“I’ve known Michael for a lot of years,” Pérez told The Observer. “I actually was at his wedding and obviously I’m a big fan as well. But funny story is when anybody runs up on me and they’re like, ‘Aren’t you Pitbull?’ I mess around and I go, ‘No, I’m Michael Jordan.’ (Laughing.) So now, funny enough, the two owners in NASCAR that are creating awareness as far as for diversity and for culture is me and Michael Jordan now.

“So when I see Mike I’m gonna tell him, ‘Hey, when anybody runs up on you and calls you Michael Jordan, you say, ‘Nah, I’m Pitbull.’’ ”

But more seriously, he said during the press conference, he saw getting involved with NASCAR as “a higher calling.”

“It’s about utilizing the culture, creating the culture through NASCAR to bring people together. I know it because I live it, I’ve seen it. Music is a universal language. When I’m out there performing for everybody, it doesn’t matter whether you speak English, Spanish, Chinese, Italian, if you are Black, white, pink, purple or orange, it doesn’t matter. We all speak music when we’re there.”

NASCAR, Pérez says, speaks a universal language, too. “Everybody loves a fast car.”

But the other thing that he says got him into the fold was Trackhouse’s unique commitment to education. The team plans to help launch a STEM curriculum at inner-city charter schools in partnership with the SLAM!.

When asked whether he’ll be visiting Charlotte more often, he told The Observer yes and that he plans to be back here soon — because he’s looking at possible sites for SLAM! schools in Charlotte.

First, though, he has a race to be at: Next weekend’s Daytona 500 in Florida, where he’ll serve as the Grand Marshal and give the command for the drivers to start their engines.

It’s among a number of things he never could have imagined doing this time a year ago.

But, Pérez told The Observer, “Why dream when you can live it?”

“And not only to be a owner, but also be able to be a Grand Marshal, to also be able to be next to Daniel — which is somebody that’s overcome all odds to be able to be a driver in the United States of America, and to be the first non-American to win a race — it’s crazy. It’s the perfect storm.

“Van Gogh, Picasso, none of them,” he said, “can paint a better picture right now.”