Tommy Baldwin Jr. beat cancer, switched manufacturers between seasons, and kept a backmarker Cup team from falling completely apart. He did all of that in three years at Rick Ware Racing. On July 27, he called it quits.
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“We decided, Rick and I, that our expectations were not aligned anymore. Without ruining our friendship — which we have a really good friendship — it was decided to go different ways,” Baldwin Jr. said on this week’s episode of Door Bumper Clear.
No drama or finger-pointing. It’s two guys who saw things differently and liked each other too much to let it get ugly.
Tommy Baldwin came aboard in April 2023 as Competition Director, brought in to push RWR past the tier they had been stuck in for years. He was not just running one car. The job covered the No. 51 Cup entry, an ARCA program, a CARS Tour team, NHRA entries, and World Supercross. Within months, he had the team posting a seventh at Atlanta with J.J. Yeley, their best Cup finish at the time. Then August came, and he got a cancer diagnosis.
After rounds of radiation and chemotherapy, he lost sixty pounds, and yet returned. By early 2024, he began working his way back into both roles: the RWR job and his own Tommy Baldwin Racing Modified program on the side.
His last big project at RWR was the messiest. Late in 2025, the team dropped Ford and switched to Chevrolet, locking in a new technical alliance with Richard Childress Racing and ECR Engines. Baldwin ran point on the whole transition. He called it nonstop work. The switch was done, but the results did not come with it. The No. 51, driven by Cody Ware, is dead last among full-time Cup drivers right now, with a 17th at Daytona as the season highlight.
At some point, the gap between effort and outcome gets hard to ignore. Both men saw it. Neither wanted it to cost them the friendship. When asked what is next, Tommy Baldwin did not overthink it.
“Right now, worry about the kids. Have a little fun, figure out what the next options are. Take a little break, enjoy some stuff.”
For years Tommy Baldwin balanced RWR’s 80-hour weeks with his own Modified program, running a rotating lineup of sharp drivers like Doug Coby, Jimmy Blewett, and Mike Christopher Jr.
That team won the NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour Owner’s Championship. It was always less of a side project and more of a pressure valve, the part of racing he did purely because he loves it. Without the Cup grind swallowing every week, he can actually be at the track for his sons instead of watching from a distance.
It is also hard to go through what Tommy Baldwin went through medically and come out the other side chasing the same things in the same way. When you have already had to sit with the possibility that you might not get more time, a struggling backmarker operation with misaligned expectations stops feeling like something worth grinding through.