By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor
(NASCAR)—William Darrell Wallace, known to friends and fans as “Bubba,” has been declared the winner of the rain-shortened race at Talladega, a historic win at a track with great historic significance to the first African-American driver to win a race in NASCAR’s highest division in 57 years.
Wallace, the only black driver in NASCAR Cup competition, drives for a new team owned by basketball star Michael Jordan and fellow driver Denny Hamlin. The race, postponed from Sunday because of rain, was called after 117 of the scheduled 188 laps Monday because of more rain. Wallace, who had started 19th, drove his way to the front five laps from the end, passing Kurt Busch to become the 19th driver to lead the race on the track that traditionally features nose-to-tail racing and at least one big crash. A wreck on the 116th lap, just before the rains came, froze the field with Wallace at the head of the pack.
Restrictor plate races at the big high-banked tracks of Daytona and Talladega are traditionally mad and unpredictable scrambles but Wallace has shown flashes of strength in those races. He has finished second twice at Daytona although his best previous finish at Talladega was 14th.
He finished ahead of two Ford teammates, Brad Keselowski and Joey Logano. Bush was squeezed back to fourth, just ahead of Christopher Bell.
The next race, on the Charlotte Roval, will be a cut-down race in which four drivers are eliminated from the chase for the championship. Kevin Harvick, who led more laps in the Talladega race than any other driver, was shuffled back to eighth when the red flag came out, short-circuiting his hopes of climbing into the top eight in the points chase. He’s nine points out of the playoff field heading to Charlotte. Christopher Bell’s fifth-place run still leaves him 28 points back. William Byron, who tangled with two other cars just before the rains hit, is in a must-win situation if he is to advance, as is Alex Bowman, whose chances for a good finished vanished when his car was badly damaged in an early-race wreck with three other competitors.
The victory in the playoff race will not propel Wallace into the next three-race runoff round because he was not among the top sixteen drivers in the points when the regular season ended.
(THE BACKSTORY)—Wallace’s victory was a popular one among his colleagues who showed their support of him by pushing his car to the front of the starting field at Talladega in June, last year, after a noose was reported on the pull-down rope of the door of his garage at the track. The FBI investigated and determined that the noose had been there since the previous October, at a time when it could not have been predicted Wallace’s team would later use the garage. Wallace supported the finding.
Wallace was born almost three years after the death of the only other black driver to win a top-level NASCAR race. His victory comes a little more than 100 years after the birth of Wendell Scott, who passed Richard Petty with 25 laps to go on the half-mile dirt track at Jacksonville Florida in 1964 and went on to win. He was not announced as the winner, however—some say it was because of the racist culture of the time—and the win originally went to Buck Baker, who was two laps behind. NASCAR discovered two hours after the race that Scott had won but he was not officially awarded the win for two more years. He never received a trophy. NASCAR presented his family with the trophy he had earned in 2010, seven years before Bubba Wallace ran his first NASCAR Cup race.
Scott ran his last NASCAR race in 1973 but it was injuries he suffered in a crash at Talladega earlier in the year that forced him to retire. He died in 1990. He never had a sponsor. His low-budget owner-driver operation nonetheless saw him finish in the top ten in the points standings four times in a thirteen-year, 495-race career. He finished in the top ten at the end of 147 races.
Bubba Wallace’s team has had full sponsorship all year. Next year, 23XII Racing (23 was Jordan’s jersey number and XII refers to Hamlin’s car number, 11) will expand to a second car with former NASCAR champion Kurt Busch as driver.
(INDYCAR)—Wheels already are turning for the 2022 INDYCAR season. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s Rookie Orientation Program tomorrow will feature two drivers who focused on road courses this year, Jimmie Johnson and Romain Grosjean.
Johnson, who raced on the track’s road course this year, is not unfamiliar with the big oval. He ran eighteen Brickyard 400s in his NASCAR days and won four times. But this will be his first time on the oval in an open-wheel car. He has tested an Indycar on an oval however, running some test laps at the Texas Speedway. He has expressed an interest in running the Indianapolis 500 in May but has not committed to the other ovals on the schedule at Texas, Iowa, and Gateway.
Joining him in getting the feel of the big track is Romain Grosjean, the former Formula 1 driver who built a big following in the series this year. He got a taste of oval racing late in the season at Gateway’s Worldwide Technology Raceway in August. It will be his first run for his new team-owner, Michael Andretti. He’s moving over from Dale Coyne racing.
Before drivers are allowed to run on the Indianapolis oval, they have to prove they can handle it. The program requires them to run ten laps at 205-210 mph, fifteen more at 210=215, and then 15 laps at more than 215.
The big test will come in May. In this year’s 33-car starting field, Simona DeSilvestro had the slowest four-lap qualifying run at 228.353. Will Power had the slowest qualifying lap at 227,535.
Scott Dixon sat on the pole at 231.685 with a fast lap of 232.757.
The last NASCAR driver to run the 500 was Kurt Busch, who was the rookie of the year with his sixth place finish in 2014. “The Indianapolis 500 will blow you away,” he said after the race. Johnson could become the nineteenth driver to drive in both the Indianapolis 500 and the Brickyard 400, which was first run in 1994.
(FORMULA 1)—Formula 1 was off last weekend. It resumes racing in Istanbul with the Turkish Grand Prix. Lewis Hamilton is clinging to a two-point lead over Max Verstappen. \
(Photo credits: Bob Priddy; Wendell Scott—NASCAR Hall of Fame)