Marcos Ambrose is leaving NASCAR at the end of the season to go back to his native Australia, it was announced Saturday morning. There is talk that Ambrose is heading to a V8 Supercars team being formed by Roger Penske, who owns two NASCAR teams (Cup, Nationwide) and an IndyCar team, but Penske has said that it would take a lot of work for him to field V8 Supercar teams. Ambrose raced in that series from 2001 to 2005 and won two championships.
Ambrose came to the United States in 2006, and won his first stock car race in the Nationwide Series at Watkins Glen in 2008. He also made his Sprint Cup debut with the Wood Brothers in their famous #21 car in 2008, and went full-time in Cup in 2009 driving Brad Daugherty's #47 car. He moved to the #9 team of Richard Petty Motorsports in 2011, and won back-to-back Cup races at Watkins Glen in 2011 and 2012. Ambrose most recently won last month's Nationwide race at Watkins Glen, and then finished second in the Cup race the next day to A.J. Allmendinger, who was driving Ambrose's old #47 car.
This is the second straight year that a foreign-born driver will be leaving NASCAR for another series. Juan Pablo Montoya, from Colombia, left the #42 car of Chip Ganassi Racing at the end of the 2013 season after also winning some road course races in Cup and Nationwide. Unlike Ambrose, Montoya stayed in the United States and moved back to IndyCar, the series in which he won the 2000 Indianapolis 500.
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