On Monday morning, President Donald Trump created a firestorm in the NASCAR news cycle, when he sent a Tweet questioning whether Bubba Wallace had apologized to his fellow racers and NASCAR officials since they stood beside him following the discovery of a noose in his garage stall at Talladega, which following an FBI investigation was proven not to be a hate crime.
Has @BubbaWallace apologized to all of those great NASCAR drivers & officials who came to his aid, stood by his side, & were willing to sacrifice everything for him, only to find out that the whole thing was just another HOAX? That & Flag decision has caused lowest ratings EVER!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 6, 2020
The tweet had glaring misinformation embedded, and the timing was questionable as the incident occurred over two weeks prior to the tweet from President Trump.
However, one of the first people to jump to the aid of Wallace, who was called out by the leader of the free world, was Tyler Reddick.
Reddick responded to the President, in a now deleted Tweet, “We don’t need an apology. We did what was right and we will do just fine without your support.”
When Reddick’s Tweet went down, the question immediately became: Why did he delete it?
Did he decided to delete it? Was he persuaded by his race team — Richard Childress Racing — to do so?
Well, a little bit of both according to Reddick in an interview on Sirius XM NASCAR Radio’s Tradin’ Paint on Tuesday. In the interview, Reddick defended his response to the President by saying, “I stand by comments on Twitter and my support for my friend Bubba Wallace.”
After seeing the responses to the Tweet, Reddick stated, “I did not want to create more division.”
Reddick admitted that his response to the President was certainly emotional and that after talking to RCR, he pulled the Tweet.
“After many conversations with the men and women at RCR, the decision was made to delete the post,” Reddick explained.
Here is the full conversation about the Tweet from Sirius XM NASCAR Radio:
ICYMI: Tyler Reddick addressed his tweet in response to President Donald Trump and the decision to take it down pic.twitter.com/10hqMMAKxS
— SiriusXM NASCAR Radio (Ch. 90) (@SiriusXMNASCAR) July 7, 2020
The rookie contender has been among the first to speak up about racial injustice since NASCAR began changing protocols in the sport to make things more inclusive for all fans over the last couple of months.
Kevin Harvick, who won Sunday’s race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway also called the President’s tweet misinformed on Tuesday during an interview with ESPN’s Golic and Wingo.
“I think as a sport, I think everybody saw what our community is about at Talladega,” Harvick said. “I’ve been on several sides of this in being able to see and lean on the support of our NASCAR community and the people inside of our sport and in the garage and whether the circumstances turned out like they did or didn’t at Talladega, the unity of our garage and the family atmosphere that is created in our community is not like anything else in any other sport.
“Most of these people have been around for a number of years, been around each other, our kids have grown up around each other, a lot of the kids who raced together in a previous generation grew up together and it’s a great community to be a part of. And not many people outside of it understand the unity that comes with the NASCAR garage. The tweet doesn’t change anything about — there’s definitely some misinformed information inside of that tweet that doesn’t represent anything that’s going on.”
