As a Former High School Wrestler, Cody Ware is Ready for the Cook Out 400
MOORESVILLE, N.C. (March 25, 2025) – Wrestling a racecar for 400 laps around Martinsville (Va.) Speedway necessitates a strong upper-body and powerful legs, connected with a tight core. The flat, paperclip-shaped .526-mile oval makes for a physical race where drivers have to pull their steering wheel hard to the left 800 times while stabbing their brake pedal at the end of each, 800-foot-long straightaway. Whether one’s car is lightning quick or could use a jolt of lightning, Martinsville pushes the boundaries of human performance as much as a car’s mechanical limits.
The wrestling analogy is an apt one for Cody Ware. The driver of the No. 51 Arby’s Ford Mustang Dark Horse for Rick Ware Racing (RWR) wrestled in high school. In fact, he did it just 45 minutes south of Martinsville in the Greensboro, North Carolina, suburb of Jamestown. At Ragsdale High School, Ware made the varsity wrestling team as a freshman. He stayed there through his junior year before his burgeoning racing career meant a pivot to homeschooling. Ware earned his high school diploma in 2013 while racing Late Model stock cars and making a handful of starts on the NASCAR Whelen Southern Modified Tour.
“I started wrestling in middle school, probably around 2008, and then transitioned into high school wrestling. I made the varsity wrestling team my freshman year, which I was pretty proud of,” Ware said.
“Wrestling at Ragsdale was a big deal, so to be a freshman on the varsity team was a real honor. I had to beat out one of the seniors to make the cut. It always stuck with me that while making varsity was big, staying on the varsity team was just as big, if not bigger. Nothing was guaranteed. You had to go out and earn your place every match, every year.
“It’s what really got me started as an athlete. Being really tall, I needed to develop my core strength and overall fitness. I had a larger stature and I needed to make the most of it.”
Standing at 6 feet, 4 inches, Ware’s athleticism continues to serve him well as a fulltime competitor in the NASCAR Cup Series. Sunday’s Cook Out 400 at Martinsville is more than just a friendly reminder that performance applies to both car and driver.
“There’s a lot of strength needed for driving a racecar, especially when it comes to braking,” Ware said. “It takes a lot of brake pressure to extract 700-800 pounds of braking force into the corner. And at Martinsville, we’re doing that 800 times over the course of 400 laps. It’s about being on your game from start to finish, where you’re as good on lap 400 as you were on lap one.
“The wrestling analogy is a good one for Martinsville. There’s a lot of tight racing and you’re throwing your car around. It can be chaos inside the car trying to do everything you need to make a good lap.”
Ware saw that chaos as a young fan in the stands. Martinsville was his hometown track, along with Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The now 29-year-old Ware was a regular visitor to both as a pre-teen and teenager, and the Triad area where he grew up – Greensboro, Winston-Salem and High Point – was home to many NASCAR entities.
“We had a ton of racing in the Triad when I grew up,” Ware said. “You had mega race teams that were there back in the 2000s, like Bill Davis Racing and the No. 45 team with Adam Petty. Bobby Labonte had his shop there. Clyde Vickers’ CV Products and his son, Brian, were from Thomasville. And, of course, there’s Bowman Gray, the longest running weekly racetrack in America. There’s just a lot of history, a lot of good racing, and a lot of good racers from that area. It was cool to grow up among it all.
“And people there take a lot of pride in it. It seems that Greensboro is always the No. 1 or No. 2 media market to watch NASCAR racing. People there are tuned in, they’re connected, and I think they wear it as a badge of honor.”
Badges of honor from Martinsville come in the form of busted front grills, bashed in back bumpers and Goodyear-made donut rings on the sides of racecars. While it’s all a part of racing in such cramped confines, mitigating those badges is important to ensuring one’s racecar is there at the finish. This puts a premium on qualifying, where with more cars behind you instead of in front of you, the greater your opportunities are to have a relatively clean race.
“At Martinsville, the biggest thing is going to be qualifying and track position, and I’m going to lean on Corey LaJoie to help me on that front,” said Ware, referencing his RWR teammate who is running a limited NASCAR Cup Series schedule in 2025. “Corey’s got a lot of seat time at Martinsville. I’ll be picking his brain more than normal to try to figure out what tweaks I can make to my driving style and how I can give good feedback to the crew so I get what I need out of the car.
“Tires equalize pretty quickly at Martinsville, and 40-50 laps into a run, everyone’s pretty much running the same time, whether it’s first or 36th. Whatever you can do to start strong and either maintain track position or improve on restarts, that’s where most of your progress is going to be made throughout the day.”
Practice for the Cook Out 400 begins at 2 p.m. EDT on Saturday with qualifying following immediately afterward. The race goes green at 3 p.m. on Sunday with live coverage provided by FS1 and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.
About Rick Ware Racing:
Rick Ware has been a motorsports mainstay for more than 40 years. It began at age 6 when the third-generation racer began his driving career and has since spanned four wheels and two wheels on both asphalt and dirt. Competing in the SCCA Trans Am Series and other road-racing divisions led Ware to NASCAR in the early 1980s, where he finished third in his NASCAR debut – the 1983 Warner W. Hodgdon 300 NASCAR Grand American race at Riverside (Calif.) International Raceway. More than a decade later, injuries would force Ware out of the driver’s seat and into full-time team ownership. In 1995, Rick Ware Racing was formed, and with his wife Lisa by his side, Ware has since built his eponymous organization into an entity that competes full-time in the elite NASCAR Cup Series while simultaneously campaigning successful teams in the Top Fuel class of the NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series, Progressive American Flat Track and FIM World Supercross Championship (WSX).
