MOORESVILLE, N.C. (July 30, 2025) – The NASCAR Cup Series heads to America’s Heartland for the Iowa Corn 350 on Sunday at Iowa Speedway in Newton. While it will be just the second visit the Cup Series has made to the .875-mile oval, the track is not new to NASCAR.
Located less than 40 miles east of the capital city of Des Moines, the facility played host to the NASCAR Xfinity Series and NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series from 2009 through 2019, holding a total of 33 races (20 Xfinity Series races and 13 Truck Series races). NASCAR had been absent from Iowa since 2020, with last year’s Cup/Xfinity double bill providing a welcome return to a track many in the industry have come to love.
The D-shaped oval was designed by NASCAR Hall of Famer Rusty Wallace, and its similarity to the .75-mile Richmond (Va.) Raceway is no coincidence. Wallace claimed Richmond as one of his favorite tracks, and when he joined Iowa’s design team in 2003, Wallace used Richmond as his baseline.
Iowa features variable banking, with the turns banked between 12-14 degrees, the frontstretch at 10 degrees and the backstretch at 4 degrees. Construction of Iowa began on June 21, 2005 and the facility made its public debut on Sept. 15, 2006 with a Hooters Pro Cup Series race during which driver Woody Howard became the track’s first victor. ARCA Menards Series races followed in 2006 and the IndyCar Series joined Iowa’s lineup in 2007.
All that history is just that to Cody Ware, driver of the No. 51 Costa Oil 10-Minute Oil Change Ford Mustang Dark Horse for Rick Ware Racing.
Despite a background that has encompassed all three of NASCAR’s top series – Cup, Xfinity and Truck – as well as starts in IndyCar, Ware has never raced at Iowa. The Iowa Corn 350 will mark his Hawkeye State debut even as Ware has 166 collective starts across Cup, Xfinity, Truck and IndyCar.
“It’s really intimidating anytime you go to a place that you’ve never been before. You’re kind of on your back foot,” Ware said.
“You’ve just got to take all the information you can, from in-car cameras, watching past races on YouTube, whatever it may be, to get your bearing, not just on what a quick lap looks like, but how the race ran, how tire management played out, what the strategies were, what lines came in, what lines didn’t. It can be a little daunting, but it’s nothing I haven’t had to go through before.”
To aid in his preparation for Iowa, Ware has used the race simulator available to Ford drivers and teams at the Ford Performance Technical Center in Concord, North Carolina.
The immersive, full-motion platform simulator allows drivers and their teams to optimize their setups for individual track configurations, and for drivers to log practice laps ahead of an upcoming race weekend. It is as close to the real thing as drivers and teams can get, with a massive wrap-around, high-definition video screen that mimics the track from a driver’s perspective, complete with all the markers needed to note brake points and acceleration zones.
“For weekends like Iowa, the sim is a crucial part of me being able to do the best job that I can as a Cup Series driver to give the team a chance to get the car dialed in, get us right for qualifying and, hopefully, get us a decent starting position,” Ware said. “Without the sim, it would take me all of practice and qualifying to even have a semblance of what I needed in the car.”
In this brave new world of computer and video technology, how realistic is the simulator?
“You can make it as realistic as you want. Most guys wear their driving shoes and gloves to replicate the feel inside their racecar, but the main thing is just the repetition and learning,” Ware said. “For me, the biggest thing is just the muscle memory, getting visuals, picking up markers, knowing what I need to look for on the racetrack before I actually get to the racetrack.
“The sim does a really good job of replicating not just the racetrack, but the surrounding areas – what the infield looks like, what the markers on the fence are – all that stuff helps a lot. And especially for weekends like this where you just don’t have the experience of being on the track, it becomes an invaluable asset.”
With only 25 minutes of practice on Saturday before going right into qualifying where drivers get just one lap to secure their starting spot, the simulator allows drivers and teams to maximize the finite amount of track time they have at Iowa before Sunday’s 350-lap race.
“The simulator doesn’t just simulate race runs, it simulates the grip of the track and, specifically, how much tire grip you’re going to have in qualifying,” Ware said. “You’re able to work with your engineers in the sim to kind of hone in on where we think the grip is going to be when we’re in qualifying trim, and that just gives me the confidence to fire off on lap one, because with only 25 minutes, you don’t have the time to work up to anything. Plus, we’re only going to have time for one or two legitimate adjustments prior to qualifying, so you need to be ready to go right out of the gate.”
The gates open for Ware and his Cup Series counterparts on Saturday at 12:30 p.m. CDT/1:30 p.m. EDT when practice for the Iowa Corn 350 begins, followed shortly afterward by qualifying at 1:40 p.m. CDT/2:40 p.m. EDT. TruTV and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio will provide live coverage of both. The Iowa Corn 350 goes green on Sunday at 2:30 p.m. CDT/3:30 p.m. EDT with flag-to-flag coverage delivered by USA 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.