Can Bubba Wallace win over the next 10 weeks during the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs?
Well, yes, but there is also a historic caveat.
“Absolutely,” Wallace said during Playoff Media Day in Uptown Charlotte on Wednesday. “Hell, I’m good at winning in the Playoffs when I’m not in the Playoffs.”
It’s funny because Wallace has three career wins and the first two came in the Playoffs when he wasn’t championship eligible at Talladega in October 2021 and Las Vegas in September 2022.
A caveat to the caveat for the latter is that his car was playoff eligible that season and he very much raced as if he were a contender that fall.
So while this is technically the second time Wallace has raced for a championship following his appearance in the 2023 chase for the championship, he also de facto had something to race for the year prior too.
His third win came in the Brickyard 400 earlier in the summer and marked the first time he locked himself in before the final race of the regular season. Wallace and first-year crew chief Charles Denike have had all summer to prepare for this moment and that’s a novel experience for the 31-year-old 23XI Racing driver.
“Hell, I came off a 26-week stretch of stress and we made it in,” Wallace said of 2023. “We were the last car in, right? You get Sunday to enjoy it but then you’re back into, ‘Alright, here’s the Playoffs.’ Now, I just came off a month-long, stress-free stretch. So, I think getting to experience that was really, really nice.
“I said for a month that I didn’t care. I didn’t care if we won, if we wrecked, whatever.”
Before anyone has a knee-jerk reaction, this doesn’t mean that Wallace isn’t invested. It’s just part of his larger season-long transformation into a much more even-keeled father, racer and man in general.
“I care so much about racing that I can often get lost on where you’re at and that causes problems,” Wallace said. “It causes frustration, it causes speed loss, it causes everything. Richmond is a good example.
“We show up for practice and we were awful and I thought ‘well, Saturday is going to be a long day’ and then we’re leading. You know, I didn’t write off Richmond but I kind of just changed the approach.”