MOORESVILLE, N.C. — NASCAR Cup Series stock cars aren’t carrying chrome bumpers or promoting Winston cigarettes, but they are bringing old-school flavor to the oldest track on the NASCAR Cup Series schedule.
Sunday’s Cook Out 400 at Martinsville (Va.) Speedway marks the third race this season where cars arrive with more horsepower, less downforce and increased tire degradation.
This package opened to rave reviews four weeks ago at the 1-mile Phoenix Raceway, and delivered again last Sunday at the 1.366-mile Darlington (S.C.) Raceway. Martinsville, however, is a .526-mile oval, where added throttle response outweighs aerodynamics, putting more of the race in drivers’ hands.
“The new package has produced better racing,” said Cody Ware, driver of the No. 51 Super.com Chevrolet for Rick Ware Racing. “It puts more aspects of the race in your control with tire management and the risk versus reward of how aggressive you want to be on starts and restarts. You have to think more from the long-term aspect of, ‘OK, if I burn up all my stuff at the start of a run, I’m not going to have anything if this stays green.’ Overall, high horsepower, low downforce has definitely made it more interesting.”
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. 25, 1949. 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, oftentimes by bumper-to-bumper contact.
“Martinsville is a slugfest from start to finish, I think even more so now with the new package. You’re managing contact with the guys around you, but now you’re really having to manage the tires,” Ware said.
“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’re going to pay more of a penalty with this package.
“It’s still a wrestling match, but it’s also about precision and consistency and mitigating as many mistakes as you can throughout a run because, like we saw at Darlington, even with high horsepower, low downforce, we’re not seeing a whole lot of cautions, we’re not seeing a whole lot of wrecks.
“I think the new Chase points format has changed everyone’s mindset. You’re not just going for broke trying to win a race. You’re trying to manage it to where every spot matters, every point matters, and I think you’re seeing that with the on-track product right now.”
The new package has produced comers and goers. A driver who gets off to a fast start can be reeled in by someone who plays the long game and manages their tires, allowing their car to remain strong while others fall off significantly.
“There’s definitely more of an old-school racing mentality now,” Ware said. “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? There are different ways to work yourself into a good result.”
A good result at Martinsville would be just a little sweeter for Ware. The 30-year-old grew up 45 minutes south of Martinsville in the Greensboro, North Carolina, suburb of Jamestown. Ware attended Ragsdale High School and 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.
“Even though Martinsville is right across the border in Virginia, it’s right down the road from where I grew up,” Ware said. “I spent a lot of time there even before I started racing in the Cup Series. It’s definitely a home track race for me.”
Ware grew up in the Triad area – Greensboro, Winston-Salem and High Point – and as a pre-teen and teenager, it was home to many NASCAR entities.
“We had a ton of racing in the Triad,” 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 for NASCAR racing. People there are tuned in, they’re connected, and I think they wear it as a badge of honor.”
