If this was last year, Bubba Wallace and I would probably be talking about his drum set, his Richard Petty tattoo, and why he made fun of his girlfriend for sleep-farting on a Facebook reality show. She was a good sport about it. After laughing a bit—Wallace has a cartoon laugh, a distinct “Ha-Ha-Ha”– he'd get serious and talk about the Daytona 500, and what it was like to finish second there in 2018, his rookie year, followed by a disappointing DNF in 2019. That would lead to a conversation about the pressure of driving the No. 43 Richard Petty Motorsports Camaro in NASCAR’s top-level Cup series, especially as the only African-American driver. Then we’d talk about race, and I’d ask him how he kept his cool when baited online by a racist troll in 2017, and what it means to him to be the first full-time Black driver since Wendell Scott raced in 1971. Mostly though, we’d talk about racing.
But 2019 was a long time ago, and there’s been very little racing this NASCAR season. There has, however, been a lot of conversation about race, and Wallace has been in the center of it. He’s been thrust into the limelight as a leader and a spokesperson, and has embraced the role with a willingness and passion that surprised even his mother, who was recently quoted in the New York Times saying that she didn’t expect to see her son who, “doesn’t really care about anything but getting in the car and driving,” wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt on the NASCAR grid and speaking out against the Confederate flag—which was subsequently banned from NASCAR events. In 2020, a conversation with Bubba Wallace was already going to be about race. Then came the report of the noose. A crewmember on the No. 43 team (not Wallace) saw a looped rope hanging in the garage at Talladega Speedway and brought it to the attention of NASCAR officials. With the timing so soon after the flag ban, it was considered a possible hate crime, the FBI arrived and everyone in NASCAR spent a tense three days until the investigation found that while it did look like a noose, and was only in that one garage, it had been there since at least 2019, and thus was not a threat directed at Wallace. Now it’s all anyone wants to talk to him about.
“I have to ask you about it,” I said to Wallace during our phone interview, “or people will think I’m not doing my job.”
“Of course,” he said, and repeated again what he's had to repeat so many times in so many interviews in recent weeks: he was relieved to learn it wasn't a hate crime directed at him, he was grateful there was no immediate danger to him or his family, that he believes NASCAR responded appropriately to possibility of a racially-motivated threat, and that when he finally saw the photos of the garage, the looped-door pull sure looked like a noose to him. “What do you see when you look at the pictures?” he said.
It looks like a noose,” I said, because it absolutely looked like a noose.
“Simple as that,” said Wallace. “Simple as that.”
He sounded tired, and I could hear him yawn, for which he apologized. “How many interviews have you done this week?” I asked, and he gave a dry little laugh.
"Shit, I don’t even know," he said. "I think the PR team has had something like 300 requests." I made a joke about how he should just record his answers and press play over the phone, but he didn’t laugh again. “I wish it was that easy,” he said, “I’m wore out, for sure. But you know, it's part of the deal though.”
Before this year, before Wallace saw the videotaped murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, he figured it was enough to just be who he was, where he was, and talk about racing like everyone else. “I didn't really pay attention to it when I was younger," he said. "I was too young to understand it. We just raced a race and I’d still like to do that, but unfortunately, now we have so much media and they want to ask the hard-hitting questions. I just got to be ready for them.”
He paused and I apologized on behalf of media, hard-hitting and less so, and he laughed. "You're good," he said. "Look, I don't mind talking about fighting for what's right and what I believe in. I told some fellow competitors that they have a voice and they can stand up and speak out. That will be powerful. We really need to be talking about how to reach people, educate them.”
Wallace doesn’t hide his emotions. He cried when he finished the Daytona 500 in the top three, and in a recent appearance on CNN, he was visibly angry as he referenced the fallout from the FBI investigation which had some commenters calling the whole thing a hoax. “When you have a voice and you have a platform, people are going to try to take that away from you with all their power,” he told Don Lemon in that interview, his voice shaking with frustration.
On our phone call though, he was quieter. Thoughtful. Maybe just exhausted. Still, I got a little hint of his energy when he talked about what he’s been telling his friends and fellow drivers. “You have to understand why Black people are so mad right now, and educate yourself on that, understand why they're hurt," he said. "Watch the devastating videos of the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd, and the news about Breonna Taylor in recent weeks, and what's still going on. What does the Confederate flag really mean? How does it impact African-American culture and how does it represent pride and heritage to some and hate to others? I'm constantly trying to figure out why, trying to figure out the facts. I speak about what I believe is true and what I believe is right.”
Chris GraythenGetty Images
His support group has been his family at home, but he said there are plenty of folks at the track who have his back. “Jimmy Johnson, (seven-time NASCAR champion), he’s always checking in, always talking about it, offering advice and actually wanting to educate himself. He told me, ‘Man, I just want to be a better father. I want to help my girls understand as they grow up in these crazy times that we're in right now.’”
When I ask about NASCAR’s less-than-stellar history with racism, he said he doesn’t think about it at all. “We're in a time of right now. We're not in a time of back then and that's what I focus on. If people still carry the same views that they did back then, then so be it. I'll let them be pissed off, because I ain't going nowhere.” Then he sighed, “Hey, I have another interview right now.”
Another interview, and another race. The Big Machine Hand Sanitizer 400 is Sunday at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. There's still driving to do, too. I threw one last question at him before he hung up, “Bubba, what do you hope we’re talking about at this time next year?”
“I'm a day-by-day guy,” he said, “but I hope we're talking about the race we just won, the good finish that we had just had, and still fighting the good fight that's going on outside the racetrack.”
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