Cody Ware Looks To Strike the Right Chord at Nashville
MOORESVILLE, N.C. (May 28, 2025) – To make it in Music City, you’ve got to be smooth. The same is true when it comes to turning consistently fast laps at Nashville (Tenn.) Superspeedway, the 1.33-mile oval in the Nashville suburb of Lebanon.
Whether it’s strumming a six-string or wheeling a 3,400-pound racecar at 160 mph around Nashville’s concrete-clad surface, a patient and polished approach yields success. Cody Ware, driver of the No. 51 Arby’s Ford Mustang Dark Horse for Rick Ware Racing (RWR) in the NASCAR Cup Series, is familiar with both. The 29-year-old is an avid guitarist who uses music to offset the cacophony of rumbling V8 engines, each producing 670 horsepower.
“Music is almost as big a part of my life as racing,” said Ware, owner of a Dean Z custom guitar and a Gibson Les Paul Classic guitar. “It’s therapeutic. When you’re playing, it kind of takes you into your own little world. It’s a great way to unwind.”
When you compete in the longest season in all of professional sports, finding a way to unwind is important. The Cup Series is in the midst of 28 straight weeks of racing, with the lone off-weekend in the entirety of the 38-race schedule coming six weeks ago during the Easter holiday.
Nashville marks the 14th points-paying race on the Cup Series calendar, but it is actually the 16th race this year when you count the pre-season Clash Feb. 2 at Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and the non-points NASCAR All-Star Race May 18 at North Wilkesboro (N.C.) Speedway.
“Twenty-eight straight weeks isn’t easy, but that’s why not everyone’s out here doing it,” Ware said. “I’ve got a great family and a great support system, and all of us just love racing. We’re committed to it, so we just make it happen.”
Ware and his Cup Series counterparts are coming off the longest race on the schedule – the Coca-Cola 600 last Sunday at Charlotte (N.C.) Motor Speedway. After 400 laps around the 1.5-mile oval, Ware finished 25th. Now, he visits a Nashville track that is .17 of a mile shorter than Charlotte with 100 fewer laps.
“Nashville is a little bit of a hybrid racetrack,” Ware said. “It’s not quite an intermediate-style track like Charlotte, but it’s also not like the two other concrete tracks – Bristol and Dover.”
Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway and Dover (Del.) Motor Speedway are high-banked behemoths. The .533-mile Bristol oval has corners banked between 24-28 degrees, and the 1-mile Dover oval has corners banked at 24 degrees. Nashville, on the other hand, has just 14 degrees of banking, and its added length provides much more room in the corners, allowing drivers to try different lanes to find the fastest line around the track.
“Nashville is a lot more forgiving,” Ware said. “It’s a very wide racetrack, not quite as fast as a full-blown mile-and-a-half, and it’s a little bit shorter, so the speeds aren’t quite as high. But because it’s a little bit bigger, you kind of get sucked into the feeling of it being a mile-and-a-half, so overdriving the corners is very easy.
“You think you can drive a lot deeper into the corners than you really can, so it’s almost about reeling yourself in as a driver and being patient, and remembering that it’s about getting speed off the corner versus getting speed going into the corners.
“So, you have to have the entry patience of a short track with the discipline of an intermediate track, where you have to be consistent with your inputs, both with steering and your right foot. It’s a game of patience with smoothness in your steering, your throttle inputs and your braking inputs. The driver who looks the least out of control is typically the fastest there. It’s all about smoothness and consistency at Nashville.”
It is the same kind of smoothness and consistency emanating from the guitar ballads that are heard from the time one lands at Nashville International Airport and throughout walks along Lower Broadway’s Honky Tonk Highway.
“I appreciate and respect the blood, sweat and tears that musicians put into their craft, just like we do as racers,” Ware said. “That being said, I grew up on heavy metal and rock-and-roll. Megadeth, Metallica, Led Zeppelin and Iron Maiden are on my playlist.
“I’ve been playing on and off for about 15-16 years now. It’s kind of my hidden hobby. I play a lot of electric stuff, and I do a little bit of acoustic, but I’ve still got some work to do there. I don’t show off too much. I’ve probably only posted about it a few times, but it’s definitely a fun way to relax and unwind.”
With Sunday’s Coca-Cola 600 in the rearview mirror – a race that took nearly four-and-a-half hours to complete – and a few new chords strummed on his guitars, Ware is refreshed and ready for Nashville.
Practice begins Saturday at 3:30 p.m. CDT/4:30 p.m. EDT, followed by qualifying at 4:40 p.m. CDT/5:40 p.m. EDT. The 300-lap race goes green on Sunday at 6 p.m. CDT/7 p.m. EDT. All of the action will be broadcast live by Prime Video 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).
