The Bubba Wallace who takes the green flag in the Sunday\u2019s Cook Out Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway won\u2019t be the same Bubba Wallace who eked out a Playoff berth two years ago.<\/p>\n
How do we know? Wallace says so.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t feel like 2023 Playoff Bubba, where like, \u2018Oh man, it\u2019s cool to be talking to you guys for Playoff Media Day,\u2019\u201d Wallace said on Wednesday at the Charlotte Convention Center. \u201cI feel like I belong here and want to continue this trend and have the utmost confidence in our team and our ability and potential to carry this into making a deep run into the Playoffs.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt all started back in February, but everything just ramps up another notch for the next 10 weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2023, Wallace qualified for the Playoffs on points in the regular-season cutoff race. This year, he won at Indianapolis Motor Speedway\u2014the first regular-season victory of his career\u2014and enters the Playoffs after four relatively stress-free weekends.<\/p>\n
Unlike two years ago, when he was bounced from the Playoffs in the Round of 12, Wallace projects an air of confidence entering the postseason.<\/p>\n
\u201cI look at the schedule and there\u2019s a lot of good tracks for us coming up,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019ve had speed at almost every track on the circuit for the next 10 weeks, so it just takes that little bit more. It takes beating out the 5 (Kyle Larson), the 24 (William Byron), the 11 (Denny Hamlin).<\/p>\n
\u201cIt takes beating the other 15 guys you\u2019re racing against to do that. And, yes, we\u2019ve had the speed to do that. We\u2019ve got to clean up the execution standpoint and go capitalize on that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Before the victory at Indianapolis, Wallace\u2019s previous two wins had come during Playoffs he had failed to make\u2014at Talladega in 2021 and at Kansas in 2022. Both tracks are in the Playoffs this year.<\/p>\n
\u201cHell, I\u2019m good at winning in the Playoffs when I\u2019m not in the Playoffs,\u201d quipped Wallace, who clearly hopes he can win races in the postseason now that he\u2019s eligible for the NASCAR Cup Series title.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Bubba Wallace who takes the green flag in the Sunday\u2019s Cook Out Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":102736,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[49,48,717,3932,9579,4386,720,634,582,721,1704,722,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-102735","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nascar","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-charlotte","11":"tag-denny-hamlin","12":"tag-indianapolis-motor-speedway","13":"tag-kyle-larson","14":"tag-motor","15":"tag-nascar","16":"tag-racing","17":"tag-series","18":"tag-speed","19":"tag-speedway","20":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102735\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}