BRISTOL, Tenn. — It was only a few minutes after a wreck at Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas, last month when the familiar frustration came to a boil.
Bubba Wallace had missed a corner and hit Kyle Larson’s No. 5 car hard. Wallace’s car suffered a broken toe link and other damage. His day was done.
“Trying my hardest not to go down this slippery slope of self-doubt right here,” Wallace told the Fox TV crew at the time, while the race swirled on around him. He appeared angry and resigned at once.
“Two weeks in a row of making rookie mistakes six years into Cup?” he continued. “Need to be replaced.”
It’s in moments like these where you get a glimpse of the pressure that Wallace bears every week, every race. The 29-year-old driver for 23XI Racing and the only full-time Black driver in the NASCAR Cup Series hasn’t had the breeziest start to the 2023 season: He was moved out of winning contention on a late-lap push at the Clash at the LA Coliseum. He finished 30th at Auto Club Speedway, 27th at Atlanta and 22nd at Richmond after a late pit stop blunder sullied what would’ve been an admirable finish.
Wallace currently sits 24th in the Cup Series standings, right above AJ Allmendinger and Erik Jones and right below Todd Gilliland and Austin Dillon and Corey LaJoie.
And yet despite the opposite-of-noteworthy standing, Wallace hasn’t really been able to avoid the spotlight.
That’s another aspect of the pressure that uniquely belongs to Wallace.
“I always say that I try not to let the pressure get to me, and most of the time it doesn’t because I already put enough pressure on myself,” Wallace told reporters at the Bristol Media Center this past weekend. “And it may all be relative pressure to what others are saying. But I want to go out and win. I don’t wanna crash on Lap 9, so I think we just have to keep doing what we’re doing. Winning makes everything better.”
Wallace has taken steps to shed some of that pressure and narrow his focus on winning. He’s been open about his struggles with self-doubt and depression for a while, and didn’t bat an eye last week when sharing that he’d started a social media cleanse ahead of Bristol.
Why a social media cleanse, you ask?
“I mean, why not?” Wallace said, sporting a smile and a shrug. “I think I’m the most hated guy on social media.”
It helps that he’s surrounded by those who support and believe in him. That includes his race team owners, Michael Jordan and Denny Hamlin, and others throughout the garage: Brad Daugherty, after becoming the first Black principal team owner to win a Daytona 500 earlier this year, received a call from Wallace, he said — and Daugherty later reflected on their exchange.
“He reached out, and I told him, ‘I pull for Bubba Wallace every weekend,’ ” Daugherty said. “I pull for that 47 first (Ricky Stenhouse Jr.) — don’t get me wrong — but I pull for Bubba every weekend.”
Can Bubba Wallace go on a run?
Despite the early-season struggles, Wallace has shown the past few years that he is a playoff-caliber driver. There was a stretch last summer during which Wallace notched four straight Top 10s.
Now, a new question looms: Can Wallace go on a run?
A quick look at history might suggest so.
At three of the next four tracks on the Cup Series schedule, Wallace has had recent success:
— First, there’s Martinsville this weekend. Wallace finished eighth there in the fall of 2022 — a huge bounce-back week after serving a suspension for an infamous incident between him and Larson at Las Vegas, where Wallace in retaliation swung into Larson and then got into a shoving match with him on national television.
— Next, there’s Talladega. The driver earned his first Cup win — and notched the first win for 23XI Racing and only the second win for a Black driver in the Cup Series — at the superspeedway in Oct. 2021. He has since earned a reputation for being one of the better superspeedway drivers on the circuit.
— Third, there’s Kansas the first weekend in May. Kansas Speedway’s intermediate track is home to Wallace’s second of two wins in the Cup Series. He won it the last time the circuit descended there in 2022. It was a race that featured another emotional catharsis from the driver, this time of the positive variety: “What are they going to say now?” Wallace screamed in happiness over his team’s radio as he crossed the finish line.
It’s worth noting, too, that Wallace notched a 12th-place finish on Bristol’s dirt track — an impressive run for a non-dirt specialist in a race that heavily favored drivers with dirt backgrounds.
Hamlin certainly thinks the time is now for Wallace to bloom.
“I think this is certainly a pivotal point for Bubba,” Hamlin said at Richmond Raceway a few weeks ago. He added, “He’s light years of a better driver than he was a year ago. A lot of that is attributed to him. A lot of that is attributed to the team. The team’s gotten a ton better, gotten way faster, and we’re giving him the tools to be better.
“So I think this is just kind of a little snippet in time that a few weeks from now, we’re going to forget about because he’s going to have a great run, and he’ll be happy again.”
