Bubba Wallace envisioned joining NASCAR legends, again doubted himself, then ended 100-race drought

Indianapolis Star

28-07-2025

INDIANAPOLIS — Bubba Wallace drove the closing laps of Sunday's Brickyard 400 with a pair of guests in his cockpit.
Their voices echoed the dichotomy of emotions the 23XI Racing driver elicits whenever he steps on stage for pre-race introductions: those thundering boos filled with hate, disgust and doubt, and the raucous yells and rhythmic chants of his name that rain down whenever one of NASCAR's most divisive drivers finds successes. Though he's worked in recent years to silence the noise and silo himself off from the world on race days in an attempt to discover an internal calm to help lessen the valleys on bad days and refocus himself on the ones where success seems within his grasp, dueling voices still linger.
One: a nagging, irritating and oftentimes successfully demotivating devil in his ear that tells him he's not good enough to be leading the closing laps of a Crown Jewel race — and certainly not good enough to win one. And the other: a snarky, somewhat sarcastic wit that spars back with the simple notion of '(expletive) it, we can do this.'
Sunday, with the sport's best talent oscillating between hugging his outside on restarts and otherwise breathing down his neck, Wallace's angel on his shoulder won out.
Why the 31-year-old eight-year Cup series veteran still wars with those doubts is an introspective journey for another day. What matters is after a 100-race winless drought — two full seasons and nearly an entire third regular season — and the constant reminders he's yet to secure what would be just his second NASCAR Cup series playoff berth, Wallace can race the rest of this year and well into the future knowing he's taken the next step in his career. He slayed the dragon, snapped the streak and captured his first Crown Jewel with Sunday's Brickyard 400 victory, becoming the first Black driver to win on the IMS oval
'Does anyone know where the goalposts got moved to now? Anybody? Did they get moved yet? Oh, that's right, it was rigged. Of course,' Wallace chided in his post-race news conference, a reference to the ways in which the stockcar world's most high-profile active Black driver is held to what he believes to be either unreasonable or unfair standards by some when he falters, combined with the ways in which his successes are knocked down a peg, too. 'You're gonna have people boo you, and you're going to have people cheer you. I had a guy today call me a 'punk.' Well, punks get trophies, I guess.
'I like to have fun with the fans, and it is what it is, but I really do appreciate the support, deep down, as a guy who used to struggle with the boos and wonder 'Why?' It's just sports, and people are going to have the drivers they like and the drivers they hate, the drivers they want to see win and the drivers they want to see crash. But you've just got to go out a compete.'
Entering Sunday's race, Denny Hamlin, one of the co-owners of Wallace's No. 23 Toyota, took notice of what was rounding into a notably impressive race weekend for his 31-year-old driver who had shown flashes on the IMS oval in his career but never quite been able to put it all together. Wallace started Sunday afternoon sharing the front row with Hamlin's own Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Chase Briscoe, and as Hamlin fought tooth and nail to claw his way up from a last-place starting spot earned from a Saturday qualifying crash, he noted the way in which Wallace's No. 23 continued to hang around the top of the pylon.
But to be frank, this wasn't his race … until it was, as race leader Joey Logano suffered a blown tire while leading on Lap 134 of 160, Wallace trailing behind in second. All a sudden, the two-time NASCAR Cup series race winner — whose pair of wins had never come over the course of the regular season — held the lead of the Brickyard 400 with the final round of pit stops complete and ticking by.
With six laps to go and the field largely strung out, as they so often get around what some in the NASCAR community call the 2.5-mile rectangle that has hosted few race-altering passes not off restarts in recent years, Wallace looked as if he was going to win walking away, leading defending Brickyard 400 winner Kyle Larson by four seconds or more.
And then, trundling through Turns 1 and 2, he saw his tires kick up water.
'My last time through, I thought to myself, 'OK then …'' Wallace said. The yellow lights flashed, quickly followed by the red, and down pit lane he drove, reflections on the way in which his breakthrough victory four years ago at Talladega came — via a rain-shortened race fiercely panned by his detractors — quickly, if not briefly, becoming top of mind.
''Here we go again. If it rains (a bunch), then Lord have mercy, Twitter's gonna blow up,'' Wallace remembered he said to himself. 'And then, it changed to this. 'I really want to win this straight up. I want to go back to racing.' So I was content with it going on. Bummed we gave up the lead.
'And then once I saw it was Larson (who he'd be restarting next to), I knew I'd have to roll my sleeves up. He won here last year. He's arguably the best in the field, and I have no problem saying that. I respect the hell out of what he does and how he drives. He pushes us all to be that good, and so to be the best, we had to beat the best today, and we came out on top.'
It all sounds so prophetic now, but Wallace said Sunday morning felt eerily different as he roamed the grounds of IMS and readied himself for what in five or 10 years he might look back upon as a career-altering success for the 23XI driver. Derived by daily readings from a micro-meditation book called "The Daily Stoic" and the realities of parenthood with his baby boy Becks born in September, Wallace said he spends much of life nowadays with a reframed mindset that his life inside the cockpit is not his life alone. Whenever this job he gleefully calls little more than a hobby ends there will be a life afterwards — one filled with the joys, weights and responsibilities of parenthood and marriage that already exist.
And so sometime in the last 12 to 18 months or so, Wallace said he recalibrated in a way in which managed to become more driven, but also the calmest, most even-keeled version of his professional self — a switch flip that Hamlin noted.
'His peaks and valleys, he shallowed that up to where his valleys weren't as lot, and I think it seems like on the bad days, he's able to compartmentalize that and think about the positives vs. everything sucks all the time, because that's a tough way to live,' Hamlin said. 'We're in a business where if you can win 5% of the time, you're a Hall of Famer. You're gonna lose. This is a losing business, and you've got to find happiness in something other than actually winning.
'When I hired Bubba, I believed in his capabilities — not necessarily the results that he'd shown, but I understood his potential. And then there was a time where we were wrestling with, 'Man, do I want it worse than him?' I can't make him want it. That's going to have to come from within. So what I'm hoping is this shows him that hard work pays off, and hopefully we see more of this.'
What was clear within Wallace's internal monologue midday Sunday was this: He wanted it ever so badly, and not just the victory and its monkey-off-back and playoff berth implications, but for what the opportunity of success at the Racing Capital of the World invites.
In his speech during Sunday's drivers' meeting, IMS president Doug Boles remarked on how the track was celebrating Dale Earnhardt Sr.'s win in the second running of the event 30 years ago, and how 10 and 20 years after, drivers we now view as modern-day legends of the sport, Tony Stewart in 2005 and Kyle Busch in 2015, triumphed, too.
'I felt different walking into that drivers' meeting and finding a seat by myself, pulling out my phone and looking at my race notes, and when (Doug) was speaking, he mentioned that little caveat, and I thought it was interesting,' Wallace said. ''This could be the start of becoming a legend.'
'Now, I don't think I'm a legend in my own mind. I've got a lot of work to do, but it all starts with days like today.'
And so therein lay the confidence that managed to slay the doubts that ever so routinely surfaced as Wallace sat through an 18-minute red flag, followed by the slow trundle of additional caution laps and then not one late-race green-white-checkered restart, but two. As he characterized it, Wallace 'caught everybody sleeping on the initial overtime and wielded a comfortable lead coming down the back straight when his 23XI teammate Tyler Reddick and Zane Smith got tangled up and forced the field into a do-over.
Now sitting dangerously low on fuel — so much so that a third restart likely would've forced him into the pits and left him outside the top 20, Sunday's race winner dug deeper into his proverbial toolbox, re-racked and rolled off again.
'Those last 20 laps, it was probably 20 laps of me telling myself I'm not going to be able to do it, and so I found my biggest problem, and that's that if I could shut that off fully, we could do a lot more of this,' he said. 'I really thought this year started out way different than any other, and mentally it has, but here we were in the same spot before the race. 'Is Bubba Wallace going to make it into the playoffs?' Like, 'Damn, dude, is it me?'
'There's a lot of expectations on you to deliver with this team we have at 23XI, with having the right people and the right sponsors. It takes everybody at (the shop) to have days and moments like this, and so there's a certain expectation level to win. To not be able to for almost three years, you really start to doubt yourself and wonder, 'Wow, really is this it?' After this contract is up, is this it?' I still have a couple years left now, but hopefully this gives me at least another year more.'