Information By: HEATHER GRIFFIN / RICK WARE RACING – MOORESVILLE, NC
JUSTIN HALEY | RILEY HERBST
Nashville Advance
Event Overview
● Event: Ally 400 (Round 19 of 36)
● Time/Date: 3:30 p.m. EDT on Sunday, June 30
● Location: Nashville (Tenn.) Superspeedway
● Layout: 1.333-mile, concrete oval
● Laps/Miles: 300 laps/399.9 miles
● Stage Lengths: Stages 1: 90 laps / Stage 2: 95 laps / Final Stage: 115 laps
● TV/Radio: NBC / PRN / SiriusXM NASCAR Radio
Justin Haley, Driver of the No. 51 Pinnacle Home Improvements Ford Mustang Dark Horse
● Justin Haley, driver of the No. 51 Pinnacle Home Improvements Ford Mustang Dark Horse for Rick Ware Racing (RWR), will make his fourth NASCAR Cup Series start at the 1.333-mile Nashville (Tenn.) Superspeedway in Sunday’s Ally 400. Haley recorded back-to-back 23rd-place results in his last two outings at the concrete, intermediate-style track in 2022 and 2023. Haley also has a 19th-place finish in the 2021 NASCAR Xfinity Series race at Nashville.
● The Winamac, Indiana, native has 10 Cup Series starts on concrete tracks – three at Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway and four at Dover (Del.) Motor Speedway to go with his three at Nashville. Three of those resulted in top-20 finishes with a best of 11th at Dover in 2022, when he also led 19 laps.
● Both of Haley’s top-10 finishes this season have come on intermediate-style tracks – ninth place finishes at Darlington (S.C.) Raceway and World Wide Techonolgy Raceway in Madion, Illinois – and he’s finished in the top-13 in three of the last six races.
● Despite an official result of 29th in last Sunday’s USA Today 301 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway in Loudon, Haley and the No. 51 RWR team had a solid run. The 25-year-old ran in the top-15 for the first two stages and was sitting fifth when the race was red-flagged with 77 laps remaining due to weather. When the race resumed on NASCAR-mandated wet-weather tires for the remainder of the race, Haley was holding position in the top-10 before sustaining damage during an incident on lap 294, which ultimately impacted the handling of his Ford Mustang Dark Horse in the closing laps.
● Pinnacle Home Improvements returns to the No. 51 RWR machine this weekend after debuting during Haley’s fourth-place showing in the All-Star Open at North Wilkesboro (N.C.) Speedway in May. Headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia, Pinnacle is a direct-to-homeowner provider of home improvement services, with a focus on roof replacement, window replacement and other exterior services for existing single-family homes. With additional offices in Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Nashville, Tennessee, as well as Charlotte, North Carolina, the company’s existing service footprint covers a range of attractive Southeast U.S. markets, with planned expansion into new Southeastern markets.
Riley Herbst, Driver of the No. 15 Monster Energy Zero Sugar Ford Mustang Dark Horse
● The black and green No. 15 Monster Engery Zero Sugar Ford Mustang Dark Horse returns to the track at Nashville with Riley Herbst behind the wheel for his seventh Cup Series start and second on a non-superspeedway track.
● Herbst competed at Daytona (Fla.) International Speedway with RWR last February, earning a 24th-place finish, and most recently competed with the team at Kansas Speedway in Kansas City on May 5 for his first non-superspeedway start. Overall, Herbst owns two Cup Series top-10s including a best finish of ninth last October at the 2.66-mile Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway oval, and 10th in his Cup Series debut in the 2023 Daytona 500 with RWR.
● The Las Vegas native owns three Xfinity Series starts at the track located 40 minutes from downtown Nashville, all resulting in top-10 finsihes. Herbst earned his best finish there last year, when he started fifth for the scheduled 188-lap race and finished second, just 1.323 seconds behind race-winner A.J. Allmendinger.
● Based in Corona, California, Monster Energy is the leading marketer of energy drinks and alternative beverages. Refusing to acknowledge the traditional, the company supports the scene and sport. Monster Energy is a brand that believes in authenticity and the core of what its sports partnerships, athletes and musicians represent. More than a drink, it’s the way of life lived by athletes, sports, bands, believers and fans.
Rick Ware Racing Notes
● The Progressive American Flat Track (AFT) series wrapped up a weekend at the Bridgeport (N.J.) Half Mile last Saturday with Kody Kopp atop the podium in AFT Singles. The 19-year-old rider won the pole and the feature to set a new record for winningest AFT Singles rider with 20 wins, surpassing RWR teammate Shayna Texter-Bauman’s previous record of 19 wins. Kopp, a three-time class champion, is also tied for the most wins in the half-mile category. Kopp is on a three-race win streak as the tour heads to the Lima (Ohio) Half Mile, where he dominated in the AFT’s last two visits. Texter-Bauman is also a two time winner at Lima. In Mission SuperTwins, two-time class champ Briar Bauman also picked up the pole position at Bridgeport and finished fourth in his feature. He has three Lima Half-Mile wins – 2017, 2021 and last year, when he claimed KTM’s first twin-cylinder victory in the premier class.
● NHRA Top Fuel driver Clay Millican heads to Norwalk, Ohio with the Mission Foods NHRA Drag Racing Series for the ninth event of the season. So far in 2024, the six-time Top Fuel winner has three semifinal appearances – at the Las Vegas Four Wide Nationals, New England Nationals in Epping, New Hampshire, and Thunder Valley Nationals in Bristol, Tennessee – and an appearance in the Top Fuel final at the Four Wide Nationals at zMax Dragway in Concord, North Carolina. He sits eighth in points, 66 out of fifth-place.
● Rick Ware has been a motorsports mainstay for more than 40 years. It began at age six 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 seat and into fulltime team ownership. In 1995, Rick Ware Racing was formed, and with wife Lisa by his side, Ware has since built his eponymous organization into an entity that fields two fulltime entries in the 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 and FIM World Supercross Championship (WSX), where RWR won the 2022 SX2 championship with rider Shane McElrath.
Justin Haley, Driver Q&A
Another weekend has passed with the No. 51 running in the top-10 consistently. Is this the new normal for RWR?
“I really feel like it is. We are learning a lot and things are coming together. I really think we would’ve had a top-five finish if it hadn’t been for the damage we were dealing with, our car was just so fast. I said a few weeks ago these are some of the best cars I’ve driven and that continues to be true. I’m just incredibly thankful for Rick and Lisa for the chance to do this every week. We have a great group of people at Rick Ware Racing and I’m proud to be a part of it.”
How are you feeling about this weekend’s race at Nashville?
“Before last weekend’s race at New Hampshire, I probably would’ve said not great. It’s not one of my favorite tracks and I’ve struggled there in the past. Somehow I qualified third there last year, which was cool, but that’s not at all how it ended. But with that being said, I think we’re really hitting on some good things and it’s hard for me to compare what’s going on now to how I’ve done in the past. There’s a few times this year that my feelings about tracks have changed, so I hope that happens again. One of the other things we have to keep in mind is we’re used to Nashville being a night race for the Cup Series, so I’m interested to see how that changes things, if it does. It’ll definitely be an interesting race.”
Riley Herbst, Driver Q&A
You made your first non-superspeedway Cup Series start at Kansas in the No. 15. What did you learn from that experience, and what do you hope to get out of a second intermediate-style race this weekend?
“The biggest thing I took away from the Kansas race is that the Cup Series is extremely competitive no matter where you are on track. The NextGen car has leveled the playing field so much and it really is a battle for position all the way through the field. I’m not sure as an industry we do a good enough job showing and communicating that, but it’s tough. By the end of the race, we had good speed, but when you get behind early, it’s really hard to come back from that. I just want to continue learning. The more laps I get on track, whether it’s the Cup car or Xfinity car, the better I’m going to be as a driver. Every driver wants to make it to the Cup Series, but if you aren’t ready when you get there, you’re going to struggle. So I just want to make the most out of the opportunity that Rick and Monster Energy are giving me and get as much out of the experience as possible.”
You have back-to-back top-three finishes in the Xfinity Series. What can you take from that to help you on Sunday?
“Honestly, there’s not much that carries over between the two cars. But I know the track really well and it suits my driving style, which I think makes a big difference a lot of times. The time on track Saturday will give me a good idea of how the track is driving. It tends to get really slick, so having a feel for that going into Sunday will be nice. It’s a really fun track to drive, and now that I understand a little better what to expect with the NextGen car, I think we’ll be able to have a decent run.”