Winning NASCAR’s Yellawood 500 at Talladega Superspeedway was always going to be a crapshoot. The race was postponed from Sunday due to precipitation and was stopped twice due to rain storms that just seemed to hover over the track.
After the second red flag and nearly a 45-minute attempt to dry the 2.66-mile track where The Big One is often the decider of racing fortunes, NASCAR decided to call the event and gave the checkered flags to the driver who was leading all comers once the red flags flew.
That driver was William Darrell “Bubba” Wallace Jr., the 27-year-old, Alabama-born racer who drives the No. 23 Toyota Camry for 23XI Racing, an entity co-owned by fellow NASCAR Toyota racer Denny Hamlin and Michael Jordan, the basketball star who wore the storied No. 23 basketball jersey. It was Wallace’s first victory in NASCAR’s premier Cup Series and he became only the second Black racer to earn the checkered flags, after NASCAR Hall of Famer Wendell Scott on December 1, 1963 in Jacksonville, Fla.
Wallace was at the front when it mattered, on the 117th lap of a race intended to run for 188 laps or 500 miles. He’d started 19th but this track’s extraordinary length and with 40 cars on the track, together with the usual and customary cautions, he was at the front when it mattered during the second stage and just before the rain restarted in earnest. He led five laps – including the most important one.
The Talladega race denied all Round of 12 combatants from qualifying for the next playoff round. Only Denny Hamlin, who won last week at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, has punched his ticket for the next round of eight players vying for the 2021 NASCAR Cup Series championship.
In fact, regular season leader Kyle Larson was punched out of the contest after a crash near the close of the first stage of racing. Larson’s Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet teammate William Byron nudged the No. 77 of Justin Allgaier into a spin that collected both Larson and the No. 14 Chevy Camaro of Chase Briscoe, from Chip Ganassi Racing.
Learning of his victory from atop the No. 23 timing stand, Wallace was completely overjoyed, surrounded by fans who” kept cheering for it to rain. That kind of amped up the intensity a little bit. Just so proud of everyone at 23XI Racing. [We’re a] new team and coming in here getting a win late in the season reminds me of 2013. I waited so long to get that first truck win,” Wallace said. He won the Kroger 200 NASCAR truck series race at Martinsville.
The Mobile, Ala. native said, “This is for all those kids out there that want to have an opportunity at whatever they want to achieve and be the best at what they want to do. You’re going to go through a lot of bullshit, but you always have to stay true to your path and not let the nonsense get to you. Stay strong, stay humble, stay hungry. There have been plenty of times that I wanted to give up, but you surround yourselves with the right people and it’s moments like this that you appreciate.”
Brad Keselowski brought the Penske Racing No. 2 Ford Mustang home in second place while his teammate, Joey Logano finished third. Kurt Busch’s No. 1 Chevy from Chip Ganassi Racing took fourth place while Christopher Bell’s Joe Gibbs Racing No. 20 Camry was fifth.
Hamlin finished seventh and was “way more emotional” about Wallace’s win “because I just know that these guys just have worked so hard over the last 10 months to put this team together. We’ve just spent a lot of hours putting this together and it’s great to see the results from all the hard work from these team guys.”
The Cup Series moves to Charlotte Motor Speedway’s Roval track this weekend for the Round of 12 finale. Four drivers will be forced out of the postseason field following the event.
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