Rick Ware may currently have the most diverse portfolio in motorsports, and that’s saying something.
The California native is best known for his two NASCAR Cup Series cars that will be handled by Justin Haley and Kaz Grala this season, but he is also involved in entries in the NTT Indy Car Series, NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series, IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, AMA American Flat Track, World Supercross and the Mazda MX-5 Cup Series.
The 60-year-old businessman became addicted to motorsports at a young age, and drag racing was his first passion.
“I got to do cool things,” Ware said of his childhood during December’s Race Industry Week interview. “I used to hang out at Vel’s Parnelli Jones shop and he would have the old Baja 1000 truck there right next to the Viceroy Indy car and they were dynoing engines getting ready to go to Indianapolis.
“Going to races for the original Trans-Am Series, which was a lot like NASCAR on a road course back in the day. It was beating and banging and all the manufacturers,” Ware continued. “I went to Carlsbad, Orange County, Lyons and Irwindale during the heyday of all the Funny Cars and the Fuel racing, Ascot in sprint cars.
“As a kid, I was enamored with racing period. I loved it. I loved every form of it. That was probably the nucleus that embedded my addiction, for lack of another word.”
Ware started racing motocross at age 9, eventually transitioned to cars and ran his first NASCAR race in 1990. He later switched his focus to team ownership and has been a mainstay in the NASCAR garage for more than a decade.
Since 2020, Ware has partnered with longtime IndyCar Series team owner Dale Coyne on the No. 51 entry.
“Dale is the only partnership that I have in motorsports,” Ware said. “Typically in motorsports, there is the race team guy and the money guy. The relationship I have with Dale is very different. I could be racing with Dale for five years and still continue to learn from him. Other than Roger Penske, he has the most Indy car starts in history. He is a hands-on guy, a hard worker and I have total respect for him.”
Ware’s NHRA Top Fuel team won three races last year with Clay Millican at the wheel, while his World Supercross and American Flat Track teams also achieved success.
“It is important for us as we build RWR as an entity that we have to be competitive,” Ware said. “NASCAR, we get our butt kicked on a continual basis, but we are getting more lead-lap finishes, top 20s, multiple top 10s, those kind of thigs. Everywhere else we compete, we can generate enough budget to have a shot to win.
“We have been on podiums in World Supercross, IMSA and this is our first full season in Top Fuel and we won three races. I think there is only one team that won more races than we did.
“We won the Daytona 500 of Flat Track at Springfield with KTM and had nine podiums, we won the World Supercross Championship and I say this because it is an important part of what we do, so when we talk to someone we can say on Mondays and Tuesday you are going to have (winner’s) videos and you are going to have success.
“You have to be careful in what you promise in the success, but we need to have a recent history of we are competitive. I hired Justin Haley, he’s won at all three (NASCAR) levels. That’s the first step, we are continually getting better.”
In addition to hiring Haley to drive the No. 51 Ford full time, Ware recently added Kaz Grala to his NASCAR lineup for 25 races in the No. 15 machine. Last year, the team entered into an alliance with RFK Racing, which is owned by Jack Roush, Fenway Sports Group and Brad Keselowski, and that relationship has improved the team’s performance.
“The past year for us, we achieved a lot of goals in different series as well as NASCAR.
We continued growth to try to excel from where we are competing right now, to shoot for top fives and top 20s and the NASCAR deal is tough,” Ware explained. “In my opinion it is the toughest form of motorsports on the planet by volume and the number of races that we run, and the number of things we do on a weekly basis in preparation.
“We are taking baby steps with that program. I feel like moving to RFK got us closer,” he continued. “It is one thing to get the information, but it is another to get it and have to decipher it and to actually get it on the car correctly.”
While the Rick Ware Racing NASCAR team has yet to visit victory lane, Ware does own two of the 40 valuable charters in the series. He is a strong advocate of the charter system.
“I always believed in the charter system,” Ware said. “It worked in everything else — Formula 1, Supercross, MotoGP. Anytime that you have a guaranteed structure in which people can invest as opposed to it being wealthy people involved until they didn’t have the comfort level to spend any more money and then they left.
“For us, it wasn’t about buying a charter for X and then turning around and selling it.
“If that was the case, we would have already done that. What it was, was the viability to continue to be in business,” he continued. “It was getting tough to even be in business in the racing world. I knew if we had a seat at the table, we could at least plan. If you have a set income, you know you are going to be in business at least for a full year. Then you can sell sponsorship based on that and you can hire better people.
“We added and increased the quality of the people and the payroll every single year. You can’t do that on just a whim, there has to be a business model there.
“At the time, we paid record prices for the charters and people laughed and said they couldn’t believe we paid that kind of money for the last-place charter,” Ware noted. “It was about being able to start to grow the team and the plan, to first off survive. I’m a racer and I try to be a smart businessman and try to grow what I really want to do, which is grow into motorsports. I love the marketing aspect of it. NASCAR was the cornerstone of the whole program and still is.”
And the ability to cross-market his multiple motorsports programs is one of Rick Ware Racing’s premier assets.
“To talk to someone and say, ‘Hey, look, you may be all about NASCAR and there are 36 events but wouldn’t you like to bring people to the Indianapolis 500?’” Ware said. “No one has ever said no to going to the Indianapolis 500 — or the U.S. Nationals, which has over 900 entries. I now have brought people from that side over to NASCAR and vice versa.
“We are a value financially to be able to do that and some of the people we compete against that have similar scenarios are a bit more expensive than we are. At the end of the day, it is a business, it is marketing, but we all race to go win races.”
Ware said one of his teams is in action 110 days out of the year and he has to “pick and choose” the events he will attend in person.
“Motorsports is alive and strong, and I am thankful to be part of it,” he concluded.