Bubba Wallace made a late-race move at Martinsville that left just about everyone scratching their head. Battling around 15th in the field, he ran over Carson Hocevar multiple times and ended up wrecking himself and a solid chunk of the NASCAR Cup Series field.
The move was extremely costly. Wallace tapped out of the race at P36. It was his second straight finish worse than 30th.
“Just made one of the more puzzling decisions we’ve seen all year, really,” The Athletic insider Jeff Gluck said on The Teardown podcast. “Because he was having a great points season. He was third in points entering today. That move with, he just sort of bulldozes Hocevar and stays on him, wrecks himself, takes himself out of the race, ends up dropping eight spots in the points. All the way down to 11.”
Bubba Wallace now has a very different outlook on the season. Gluck slammed him for the move, which cost him “points that are so valuable in this system.”
“He was having such a solid start, and even if it wasn’t going to be the great day today you’ve just got to figure out how to deal with taking a 10th-place finish, taking a 15th-place finish, whatever it is,” Gluck said. “Because he cost himself at least 20 points. At least.”
Gluck’s co-host on the podcast, fellow insider for The Athletic Jordan Bianchi, noted that Bubba Wallace had been frustrated with his day well before the Hocevar incident. His team couldn’t quite get the car right.
On top of that, Wallace was upset with Hocevar for pushing him three-wide after a restart. Bianchi explained.
“This is me just kind of projecting a little bit, I think that probably contributed to the decision there to bulldoze Carson Hocevar,” Bianchi said. “You’re frustrated because Hocevar took advantage of you on a restart, that you didn’t feel good about. Then you drive into him in the corner and just take him out. That’s not good.
“And he doesn’t have a top-five finish on the year. How quickly this all changes, a few weeks ago he’s sitting in second in points. You’re like, ‘Man, he’s running well every week.’ He just hasn’t been able to kind of break through yet, but they’re right there. Then boom — 34th, 36th and now he’s 11th in the points. No top fives and you look at this a different way and it’s like, ‘OK.’”
The moral of the story for both Gluck and Bianchi was simple. Bubba Wallace made a killer mistake.
“You can’t do it. You just have to look at the big picture,” Bianchi said. “And we’ve heard a lot of the drivers talk about this a little bit. And it is a change in mindset. And there’s people that say like not everybody quite is there yet. Or they quite realize the significance of this because nobody’s raced a system quite like this before. And now they’re just kind of figuring it out. It’s going to be one of those things later this year where people are like, ‘Oh. Oh, OK.’”