Star Wars and Mark Hamill team up with NASCAR and Bubba Wallace

Rev those engines and PUNCH IT because Star Wars and NASCAR have teamed up with longtime Lucasfilm collaborator Columbia. They have created a car wrap and flight suit—er, driver’s suit inspired by the look of an X-wing and its pilot. The driver picked for this reveal is NASCAR’s Bubba Wallace, currently the driver of the 23 car, as reported by StarWars.com.

Who better to introduce the new car wrap than someone familiar with X-wings: Mark Hamill. Luke Skywalker’s actor featured in a video with Wallace as he suited up to take the car for a spin.

So why this team up? Matt Merriman, VP of Columbia brand development shared, “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. 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?”

Designer for Columbia, Chris Araujo, added, “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. We wanted Bubba to feel like he was in an X-wing and flying around the track.” The question was, how do you take the elongated, angular X-wing and transfer it to a boxcar? “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?”

Wallace isn’t the only racer getting an updated car. It was also revealed that his 23XI teammate Tyler Reddick, the 45 car driver, will have a TIE fighter-themed car.

Look out for these cars flying around the race track soon, and read the full article about the creation of Bubba Wallace’s X-wing flight suit on StarWars.com.