Star Wars is heading to Phoenix Raceway
This weekend, NASCAR is heading to Phoenix Raceway. It’s the final race of the 2023 season.
View the Star Wars NASCAR paint scheme below.
Bubba Wallace will race a special Star Wars themed paint scheme this weekend. The car is to promote Columbia’s new Star Wars line of clothing.
Wallace will also wear a special helmet, themed around the Star Wars paint scheme.
Mark Hamill who played Luke Skywalker in the original 1977 film made an appearance in the launch video.
“Remember Bubba, the force will be with you.”
Update: Tyler Reddick running second Star Wars car
On Wednesday morning, 23XI Racing also announced that Tyler Reddick will also run a Star Wars paint scheme.
The team stated with the announcement, “Stay in attack formation. Tyler Reddick joins the dark side in his No. 45 ‘TIE Fighter’ Toyota Camry TRD in the NASCAR season finale this Sunday.”
The NASCAR Cup Series finale takes place on Sunday November 5.
Both 23XI Racing drivers are not in a battle for the championship. Wallace was eliminated in the Round of 12, Reddick was eliminated last week in the Round of 8.
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“We’ve had a relationship with Bubba Wallace, who races for [team] 23XI since 2020, and Columbia is one of the primary sponsors of the team,” Matt Merriman, VP of Columbia brand development tells StarWars.com.
Merriman added, “But this year, creating the orange Star Wars flight suit collection, we were thinking, Luke and his orange pilot suit getting into his X-wing was very similar to Bubba in his race suit climbing into his rocket ship of a car. We thought, how fun would it be if we used that similarity as a way to promote the Star Wars collaboration?”
Designing the cars
“We wanted to take a different approach to not wanting to necessarily put a poster on the NASCAR, so it wasn’t going to be a billboard or an advertisement,” says Columbia designer Chris Araujo.
“We wanted Bubba to feel like he was in an X-wing and flying around the track. I decided that, ‘Hey, what if we translated all the elements of an X-wing to a NASCAR, almost as if the NASCAR was built out of X-wing parts?”
“I had to take lots of detailed photos — taking into mind where the proportions of the car were, where the door was hitting, where the windows were hitting, where the driver would sit — and translate all those paneling details to the side of the vehicle,” he says.
“There’s a lot of standards, as you can imagine,” Araujo added. “So we partnered very closely with Alpinestars, who’s the builder of Bubba’s suits, and we tried to figure out, ‘Okay, how do we translate some of those details?’ We had to be very mindful of the elements we were going to extract and then translate to the driver’s suit.”
Then, the added to make two cars for 23XI Racing.
“We thought, ‘What would be better than an X-wing going around the track, but that X-wing being chased or in a battle with a TIE fighter?” Araujo says. “So we were able to secure the other teammate on the 23XI team, which is Tyler Reddick in the 45 car, to be in a TIE fighter-based vehicle design.”
You can view the Columbia Star Wars collection here.
Star Wars
Bubba Wallace
Photos
Star Wars
NASCAR Paint Scheme
Bubba Wallace
Star Wars
NASCAR Paint Scheme
Tyler Reddick
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Bubba Wallace | Star Wars | Columbia | Phoenix Raceway | NASCAR
