Marielkis Salazar: “It’s not that you’re a female or a male driver, you’re a driver, period”

Marielkis Salazar leads Brand Marketing and International Communications at NASCAR, where she works at the intersection of storytelling, media, and motorsport. An Emmy award-winning journalist before entering the racing world, she spent nearly a decade in television news, reporting and producing stories for Spanish-language networks before making the transition into sports communications.

Today, she plays a key role in shaping how NASCAR speaks to new audiences. She oversees Spanish-language communications and works closely with the U.S. Hispanic and Latin American media, helping the sport expand its reach beyond its traditional fan base.

Born in Caracas, Venezuela, and raised in Orlando, Florida, she is fluent in both English and Spanish. She holds a degree in broadcast journalism from the University of Central Florida and continues to bring a journalist’s instinct for narrative into her work at NASCAR.

Her work has been visible in NASCAR’s growing international presence, including efforts around the sport’s expansion into Mexico. For many fans in Mexico and across Latin America, NASCAR was unfamiliar territory. Marielkis helped bridge that gap by focusing on what transcends borders: human stories in the NASCAR garage.

“This was the most challenging project I have worked on during my time at NASCAR,” she tells Females in Motorsport.

“We had the opportunity to partner with OCESA, the same promoter that works with F1 to bring to life their race in Mexico City. They were not very familiar with NASCAR, so we had to build a foundation with them first before we could go live with our media and marketing campaigns.

“It was a lot of work, long hours, several trips to Mexico, but I would do it all over again because it was a great experience and they were great teammates.”

By elevating driver personalities, backgrounds, and journeys, she helped introduce the sport to Mexico in a way that felt relatable and authentic. Instead of leading with technicalities, she led with emotion, identity, and connection, ensuring that new audiences didn’t just see NASCAR but understood it in Spanish.

This year she’s leading the communications strategy around NASCAR’s brand refresh – HELL YEAH – a brand positioning that highlights what makes NASCAR unique.

“I’m having a lot of fun with our brand marketing team to bring this campaign to the world because they’re very creative,” she says. “For instance, earlier this year we attached a real engine to a billboard and brought it to Times Square, where we set a Guinness World Record as the World’s Loudest Billboard.”

Before NASCAR, Marielkis spent nearly a decade in television news, starting in Wichita, Kansas, as a multimedia reporter. She shot, wrote, edited, and delivered her own stories, learning firsthand how narrative shapes understanding. 

A few years later, she was named executive producer and anchor for the first Spanish newscast in the state of Kansas. Eventually, she moved back to Florida, where she continued working as a news reporter and earned a Suncoast Emmy Award for her work in a 10-piece investigative story about crime and politics in Puerto Rico.

“I had to go out into the community and cover everything, education, crime, politics,” she says. “You learn quickly that how you tell a story matters just as much as the story itself.”

She joined NASCAR in 2019, transitioning from TV news to sports PR. 

“During my job interview, I told them I didn’t know anything about NASCAR,” she says. “But I said I can offer you what I do know, which is storytelling. I have contacts, and I’m a bridge.”

That foundation now fuels her approach at NASCAR, where she works to expand the sport’s reach beyond its traditional audience. Whether supporting international initiatives, marketing campaigns like HELL YEAH, or The NASCAR Foundation, her work consistently centers on one question: How do we make people feel connected to this?

A major part of that answer lies in representation, not just who is seen, but how they are seen.

“It’s not that you’re a female or a male driver, you’re a driver, period,” she says. “We have to normalize that so everyone understands there’s a place for them here.”

Through storytelling, she helps challenge outdated perceptions, highlighting talent over labels and creating space for broader, more inclusive narratives within the sport.

She also looks beyond the drivers, asking how the industry itself shows up.

“How do we get more women here? How do we show up in the office?” she says. “That’s just as important.

“I’m someone who likes to think creatively. If you give me a script that I have to follow for the rest of my life, that might work for some people, but it’s not for me.”

Instead, she grows in an environment where she can build narratives from the ground up, where a blank page becomes an opportunity to shift perception.

“What I love is being handed a blank sheet of paper and a box of colors,” she says. “As long as the results are there, you’re trusted to paint that sheet however you want.”

And through that freedom, she continues to do exactly what she set out to do from the beginning: connect, translate, and transform how people see the sport.

Because in the end, for Marielkis Salazar, storytelling is a superpower that can transform industries.