There’s reason to think that Bubba Wallace might be a dark horse contender for the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series championship.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Wallace, who is entering his ninth Cup Series season and his sixth with 23XI Racing, is coming off a 2025 campaign that saw him win a crown jewel race in the Brickyard 400 and tie career-highs in top-five finishes (six) and top-10 finishes (14).\u00a0<\/p>\n
Wallace will also be driving for an organization in 23XI that no longer has the cloud of ongoing litigation hanging over its head, and working with a crew chief in Charles Denike that he has a year’s worth of chemistry with.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Bubba Wallace could have breakout year in 2026<\/p>\n
Since joining 23XI in 2021, Wallace has seen his career steadily take an upward turn.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He scored his first career win in 2021, earned 10 top-10 finishes in 2022, made the Cup Series playoffs for the first time in 2023, finished top-10 a career-high 14 times in 2024 and got back to the postseason with his Brickyard 400 win in 2025.\u00a0<\/p>\n
If the trend continues, Wallace is in for a career year in 2026. The 32-year-old from Mobile, Ala., has momentum on his side and will likely have fast cars under him \u2014 a scary combination for his competition.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Wallace may not have proven himself to be a perennial title threat yet, but he is becoming a more consistent figure at the front of the field, and that can only lead to good things.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There’s reason to think that Bubba Wallace might be a dark horse contender for the 2026 NASCAR Cup…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":391096,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[49,48,634,82],"class_list":["post-391095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nascar","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nascar","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391095","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=391095"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391095\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/391096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=391095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=391095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=391095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}