Penultimate Race on Half-Mile Bullring Pushes Drivers to Brink Ahead of Season Finale
MOORESVILLE, N.C. (Oct. 26, 2026) – The NASCAR Cup Series is a marathon. Beginning in February and ending in November, 36 points-paying races are spread across 20 states and involve 9,917 total laps that add up to 13,088.28 miles – a distance that spans more than halfway around the world.
Sunday’s Xfinity 500 at Martinsville (Va.) Speedway is the penultimate race on the Cup Series schedule, and it’s where drivers and crews can see the finish-line tape stretched across the end of their season-long run.
But the .526-mile oval at Martinsville is also one of the toughest tracks on the schedule. While the track is flat, it is the Heartbreak Hill of the Cup Series marathon – a grueling obstacle relatively close to the end, but one that must be conquered before the season culminates Nov. 8 at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
Like the Boston Marathon, where runners crest Heartbreak Hill five miles short of the race’s end and see there is still a ways to go, drivers competing at Martinsville are fatigued as they approach the homestretch, with the season finale at Homestead still ahead. Legs are wobbly from smashing the brake pedal a thousand times at the Cup Series’ shortest circuit, and arms are weary from wrestling a 3,400-pound racecar around its tight confines.
Just as runners must dig deep to summon the mental fortitude needed to tap the remaining strength in their bodies, drivers do the same at Martinsville, racing door-to-door with elbows out as they fight to put themselves in the best position possible for Homestead.
“Martinsville is a slugfest from start to finish. You’re managing contact with the guys around you, and you’re really having to manage the tires,” said Cody Ware, driver of the No. 51 Rocket Doctor Chevrolet for Rick Ware Racing.
“Every time you buzz the tires, you’re taking away your speed in the long run. If you get in a little too deep and make your front tires mad, you end up paying a penalty.”
Martinsville is a flat and fast bullring with a paperclip-shaped layout that has remained relatively unchanged since its debut as a dirt oval on Sept. 7, 1947. Paved in 1955, the track has always demanded physicality. It forces heavy braking at the end of its 800-foot-long straights so drivers can navigate its 600-foot corners, banked at just 12 degrees. And with nearly 40 cars on the starting grid, track position is at a premium. It’s never ceded, only taken, often by bumper-to-bumper contact.
“Racing at Martinsville is a wrestling match, but it’s also about precision and consistency and mitigating as many mistakes as you can throughout a run,” Ware said.
When Ware compares Martinsville to a wrestling match, he knows what he’s talking about. The 30-year-old 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.
“Wrestling at Ragsdale was a big deal, so to be a freshman on the varsity team was a real honor,” Ware said. “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 full-time Cup Series competitor. Sunday’s Xfinity 500 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 to 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.
“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. Ware was a regular visitor to both as a preteen 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.”
Martinsville action begins Saturday with practice at 1 p.m. ET, followed by qualifying at 2:05 p.m. TruTV and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio will provide live coverage of both. Sunday’s Xfinity 500 is scheduled for 2 p.m. with live, 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 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.
