“I’m glad May is over with, but great start to June.”
It’s been a tough month in the NASCAR Cup Series for Bubba Wallace. With three consecutive crash-related DNFs resulting in finishes of 33rd or worse, the 23XI Racing driver has plummeted from seventh to 12th in regular season point standings.
Now, with the calendar moved to a fresh page for the month of June, Wallace is making the most of the reset, rebounding from an early-race speeding penalty on Lap 44 to collect a sixth-place finish, the best result for the No. 23 team since Martinsville at the end of March.
“I hate that we got our speeding penalty,” Wallace said post-race. “Thought I ran my lights, but we can go back to the shop and double-check it, see if I messed up, but it’s frustrating because I knew our car was fast. It was nice to be able to methodically carve our way through the field and make passes.”
After serving his pass-through that came with the speeding penalty, Wallace found himself one lap behind the leaders and spent the remainder of the 90-lap opening stage trying to get the free pass. When the stage ended, though, the No. 23 came up one spot short, just behind teammate Riley Herbst.
The native of Mobile, Alabama, would quickly be promoted back to the lead-lap at Lap 107 when another caution came out shortly after the start of the second stage, for an incident involving Ricky Stenhouse, Jr.
From that point forward, it was quite the slow burn for Wallace, as the Chumba Casino-sponsored machine got closer and closer to the front of the pack as the race approached its conclusion, through making some hard-fought passes, and via strategy from Charles Denike, a first-year crew chief in the NASCAR Cup Series.
“I’ll never understand strategy,” Wallace said jokingly. “I thought we were pitted into 12th or something and they were like ‘Hey, that’s fifth and fourth in front of you’, and I’m like ‘How the hell did that happen?’”
This incredible recovery on Sunday, on a night where passing was difficult to accomplish, is hopefully the start of a run of solid finishes for the 31-year-old driver, like earlier this season when he scored back-to-back top five runs at Homestead and Martinsville.
“After those back-to-back top-three finishes, I expected that every week, and I think that may have jinxed us, I hope I didn’t say that again and jinx us again.”
“I have the utmost confidence in this team to continue to get finishes like this in a consistent manner, not the bouncing back and forth that everybody is used to out of the No. 23,” Wallace said. “We just had shit luck the last month, so I’m glad May is over with.”
Next for the NASCAR Cup Series is a trip to Michigan International Speedway, a racetrack that has been kind to Bubba Wallace in the past, with a top-five and two top-10 finishes in 11 starts at the two-mile racetrack, not to mention a win last Summer by teammate Tyler Reddick.
Wallace enters Michigan sitting 12th-place on the NASCAR Cup Series Playoff Grid, 54 points above the cutline.
