Almost a year after production of the Chevrolet compact car ended in Argentina, the Chevy Cruze ended its Stock Car racing career in Brazil with a bang.
General Motors’ Brazilian subsidiary has just announced that the Chevy Cruze has ended its official cycle on the tracks with the 2024 Brazilian Stock Car championship title, the most popular racing category in the South American country where the Bow Tie compact consolidated its legacy. As such, the Cruze is retiring from the tracks following in the recent footsteps of the street-legal model to make way for the Stock Car series’ SUV transition for the 2025 season.
“Today, the preference is for SUVs, which have evolved significantly in terms of design, comfort and vehicle dynamics,” said Product Marketing Director at GM South America, Paula Saiani. “Currently, around 40 percent of passenger car sales are concentrated in this type of vehicle, a percentage twice as high as five years ago,” she added.
Notably, the Chevy Cruze’s victory in the 2024 Brazil Stock Car Pro Series represents the Cruze’s seventh title in the premier national motorsport category in South America’s largest country and was claimed by driver Gabriel Casagrande of the AMattheis Vogel team. This is the third time the driver and the team clinched the championship with the Cruze race car.
In addition to Casagrande’s three titles with the AMattheis Vogel team, driver Daniel Serra won three more, while Ricardo Maurício collected another trophy for the Chevy Cruze Stock Car – which won seven championships over the eight seasons it competed. With this, only the Chevy Opala has more titles in Brazilian Stock Car competition with 15 trophies. Chevrolet is the category’s most successful winner with 35 titles since its entry in 1979.
The Chevy Cruze officially said goodbye to the streets and tracks during the 2024 calendar year, as the model completed its global discontinuation and marked the end of an era. In the domestic market of Brazil alone, nearly 300,000 Cruze units were sold between the sedan and hatchback body style since the introduction of the first-generation model in 2011. The Cruze will be replaced on the track by the all-new Chevy Tracker Stock Car in the 2025 season.
Plus, a nationwide lease on extended-length full-size SUV.
With more than 2 million units sold in the U.S. since 1999.
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I wonder what one of these cars goes for in the used market. Would make a sweet weekend track car.
Here’s the future of NASCAR, folks…
Amazes me how a model most Americans thought of as a sweet and innocent little compact car could turn things upside down in the world of Brazilian auto racing. (Maybe there's hope for my 2013 Cruze yet?)