Kick Streamer To Adorn Cody Ware’s No. 51 Ford Mustang in Xfinity 500
MOORESVILLE, N.C. (Oct. 22, 2025) – In what is believed to be an industry first, a streamer and social media influencer will serve as a team’s primary partner in a NASCAR Cup Series race.
Rexzilla, whose real name is Andrew Rex Lisle, is a Kick streamer with a social media following of more than a quarter million. And while it will be Cody Ware’s name above the driver’s door, it will be Rexzilla’s name emblazoned on the No. 51 Ford Mustang Dark Horse of Rick Ware Racing (RWR) in the Xfinity 500 Sunday at Martinsville (Va.) Speedway.
“This is more than just a sponsorship. It’s a way to show that creators can play a major role in mainstream sports,” said Rexzilla as he recently discussed the promotion on Kick. “We’re bringing the energy of the Kick community straight to NASCAR.”
Kick is a live-streaming platform that offers a creator-friendly environment with better revenue sharing, fewer content restrictions and a rapidly growing user base. Rexzilla has been on Kick since 2024, but has been streaming for over a decade.
“Rexzilla is a professional gamer and streamer, and he’s been doing this for the last decade of his life. He’s on the Kick.com platform, which is a relatively new streaming service,” Ware said.
“We first got to know each other through an introduction from my brother, Carson, when Rexzilla attended this year’s Daytona 500. Rexzilla is a big-time NASCAR fan. In fact, he’s been following NASCAR since he was a kid growing up in Arkansas.
“Gaming is a hobby of mine, and our worlds just naturally collided. He came out to the Coca-Cola 600 earlier this year, and his last race was just a few weeks ago at Kansas. Over time, we started talking about what a partnership could look like, and here we are.”
It’s a symbiotic partnership. Rexzilla wanted to reach a new fanbase via the tangible world of NASCAR. RWR wanted to expand its reach into the digital space and, more specifically, the gaming community.
“There’s uniqueness to both sides of this,” Ware said. “For me as a driver and for the race team as a whole, tapping into a huge online presence in way that hasn’t been done before is a great way to broaden our reach and help grow the sport.
“This is the first time a streamer has been a primary partner on a NASCAR Cup Series stock car. Rexzilla gets to combine two of his passions – gaming and racing – onto a national platform. He’ll be front and center, literally, on our racecar in a race that’ll be nationally televised on NBC. It’s a really strong cross-promotion that benefits both of us.”
It’s appropriate that Sunday’s Xfinity 500 is on NBC for it will be must-see TV. The penultimate race of the 2025 Cup Series schedule serves as the cutoff race for the Championship 4 season finale Nov. 2 at Phoenix Raceway. Eight drivers enter Martinsville still eligible for the year-end title, but when the checked flag drops, only the top-four drivers will be vying for the championship a week later in the winner-take-all format.
“Martinsville is probably the most interesting race of the year,” Ware said. “Four of the eight guys still competing for the championship get eliminated. Meanwhile, the rest of the field is still trying to get all they can with just two races remaining.
“It’s an electric atmosphere where, even when the race is over, there’s an air of uncertainty of who’s racing for a championship next week at Phoenix and who isn’t.
“It’s everyone’s last chance, even for guys like me who aren’t in the title hunt. We know the season’s coming to an end and the opportunities to make something happen this year are becoming fewer and fewer. It all tends to breed a little chaos.”
Five hundred laps around Martinsville’s flat, .526-mile oval is tough enough. Drivers have to pull their steering wheel hard to the left 1,000 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.
“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 a thousand times over the course of 500 laps. It’s about being on your game from start to finish, where you’re as good on lap 500 as you were on lap one.”
Ware’s first laps at Martinsville come Saturday when practice starts at 4:30 p.m. EDT followed by qualifying at 5:40 p.m. TruTV and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio will provide live coverage of both. The Xfinity 500 goes green Sunday at 2 p.m. with flag-to-flag coverage delivered by NBC 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 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, FIM World Supercross Championship (WSX) and zMAX CARS Tour.
