Milestone Moment Comes This Sunday in Food City 500
MOORESVILLE, N.C. (April 9, 2026) – Cody Ware will make his milestone 150th career NASCAR Cup Series start this Sunday at Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway when he takes the green flag for the Food City 500.
The Greensboro, North Carolina, native made his first Cup Series start on March 5, 2017, at Atlanta Motor Speedway as a 21-year-old. In the seven years that followed, Ware ran select races. It wasn’t until 2025 that he ran his first full Cup Series season.
“This is a milestone that I look at through two different lenses,” said Ware, now 30 and driving the No. 51 Costa Oil 10-Minute Oil Change Chevrolet for his family-owned Rick Ware Racing (RWR). “It’s definitely cool to be able to notch 150 Cup Series starts, but the majority of those starts don’t feel real. I’d say the last two-and-a-half seasons of Cup racing have really been a more proper experience in the Cup Series.”
Bristol is a microcosm of Ware’s mindset. He has made only three Cup Series starts at the high-banked, .533-mile oval. The learning curve remains as steep as Bristol’s 28 degrees of banking.
“Even though the distance at Bristol is not very long – a little more than 266 miles – 500 laps there is a long time,” Ware said. “The mental endurance it takes to run at 110 percent and be on your A-game from start to finish is key. You have to be laser-focused on hitting your marks, but also ready to adapt.
“Bristol is not like a traditional short track where the bottom lane is dominant throughout the race. You see people racing the middle line and the high line, and the track conditions play a big part in that. You need to be on the wheel and stay ahead of those changing track conditions, and really pay attention to tire wear and what you’re feeling during the course of a run.”
That feeling has been exemplified of late. Two of the last four races at Bristol have seen extreme tire wear, to the point drivers are racing the track conditions more than each other.
“I think everyone enters Bristol with a healthy level of apprehension,” Ware said. “We’ve just seen a lot of bizarre things of late – cording tires after 20 laps in practice, but then on raceday it’s fine. Other times, like the last time we were at Bristol for the night race, everything seemed OK in practice and qualifying, and then on Saturday night, people were having flat tires left and right. You couldn’t run more than 30-40 laps without having to make a pit stop.
“Now we’re coming back with more horsepower and less downforce, so we’re going to wear out the tires even faster. And with Bristol being up in the mountains, you never really know what the track temperature’s going to be. Sometimes we go there and it’s 80 degrees, other times it feels like 40 degrees.
“There are so many variables that go into Bristol, and now we’re adding another one that can lend itself to more chaos.”
Managing the chaos creates comers and goers, meaning that drivers who manage their tire wear early in a run can be better than their counterparts at the end of a run. It’s the kind of racing NASCAR Hall of Famers Mark Martin, Dale Jarrett and Bobby Labonte used to their benefit.
“There’s a lot of strategy at Bristol that a driver, a team, and a pit crew can employ to work their way into a good result,” Ware said. “Bristol does have a little bit more of that old-school racing mentality where it’s like, do you want to be fast the first 20-30 laps of a run, or do you want to be fast 100 laps into a run?”
Ware’s run to his 150th Cup Series start begins Saturday at 4:30 p.m. EDT with a one-hour practice before qualifying at 5:40 p.m. Prime Video and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio will provide live coverage of both. Sunday’s Food City 500 goes green at 3 p.m. with live, flag-to-flag coverage delivered 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. In 1995, Rick Ware Racing was formed, and with wife Lisa by his side, Ware transitioned out of the driver’s seat and into fulltime team ownership. He has since built his eponymous organization into an entity that competes full-time in the elite NASCAR Cup Series while simultaneously campaigning winning teams in the Top Fuel class of the NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series, Progressive American Flat Track (AFT), FIM World Supercross Championship (WSX) and zMAX CARS Tour.
