MOORESVILLE, N.C. (May 26, 2026) – When playing his Dean Z custom guitar or Gibson Les Paul Classic, Cody Ware plays with feel. When wheeling his No. 51 Jacob Construction Chevrolet, the 30-year-old racer drives with feel, too.
It’s an approach that’s especially appropriate this weekend as the NASCAR Cup Series heads to the Music City suburb of Lebanon, Tennessee, for Sunday night’s Cracker Barrel 400 at Nashville Superspeedway.
Whether it’s shredding on a six-string or driving a 3,400-pound racecar at 160 mph around Nashville’s concrete-clad 1.33-mile oval, finding the right feel is the fastest way to success. Ware is an avid guitarist who uses music to offset the cacophony of rumbling V8 engines that each produce 750 horsepower.
“Music is almost as big a part of my life as racing,” Ware said. “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. Nashville marks the 14th points-paying race on the Cup Series schedule, but it’s actually the 16th race of the year when including the preseason Clash Feb. 4 at Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and the non-points NASCAR All-Star Race May 17 at Dover (Del.) Motor Speedway. After Nashville, 22 races still remain.
“Thirty-eight race weekends 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 28th. 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 Motor Speedway are high-banked behemoths. The .533-mile Bristol oval has corners banked between 24 and 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 heard in the guitar riffs and ballads that greet visitors from the moment they land at Nashville International Airport through their 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 almost 20 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 five 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, FIM World Supercross Championship (WSX) and zMAX CARS Tour.
