If you want to understand just how competitive Bubba Wallace is, you only needed to watch his reaction after finishing second at New Hampshire Motor Speedway on Sunday.
This is a man who has made no secret of the fact that Loudon isn’t exactly his happy place. He struggled in Saturday’s practice session, started 23rd on Sunday and spent much of the afternoon wrestling with a car that, by his own description, was among the worst-handling machines he has driven all season.
Naturally, he finished second.
By 0.586 seconds.
It was Wallace’s best finish in nine starts at New Hampshire, which explains the strange combination of satisfaction and irritation that followed.
He had every reason to be pleased. He had taken a car he didn’t particularly like around a track he doesn’t particularly like and nearly beaten Ryan Blaney, who has now won the race two years in a row.
But nearly winning is a dangerous place to leave a professional race car driver.
“That’s the thing, I kind of hate about this place,” Wallace said. “We had the worst driving car this year and I finished second.”
There is something wonderfully NASCAR about that sentence.
Wallace’s day was essentially a long exercise in making something unpleasant work. Rather than fighting the car he wanted, he had to figure out how to make the car he actually had go fast.
He said he had spent much of the week trying to convince himself to stop searching for the perfect setup and simply deal with what was underneath him.
“I think I finally know, throw out the field I’m chasing,” Wallace said. “Which is hard to go as a race car driver, searching for the right front, it’s not really ever there.”
Translation: Stop looking for the unicorn and ride the horse you’ve got.
And that’s what Wallace did.
He methodically worked his way forward from 23rd, survived the various cautions and strategy swings and eventually found himself in position to challenge Blaney for the victory. The final pit stop made the fight particularly interesting.
Blaney took two tires.
Wallace took four.
The conventional wisdom suggested Wallace had the advantage. Fresh rubber against tires that had already spent plenty of time being abused around New Hampshire’s notoriously abrasive little circuit should have made this a matter of time.
For a while, it looked as though Wallace was going to prove that very point.
He chased Blaney through traffic and closed to within less than half a second. The leader had to manage his tires and lapped traffic while Wallace had the benefit of four fresh ones.
Then, with fewer than five laps remaining, Wallace locked up.
The left-front developed a big vibration, and suddenly the chase was over.
“It did,” Wallace said when asked whether the lockup had sealed the result. “I picked up a big vibration on the left front. That was kind of it.”
The frustration was obvious because Wallace knew he had just lost his best opportunity to win at a track where he had never finished better than 10th.
Instead, second became the salvage operation.
“Made our great day go to crap and salvaging what we had,” he said.
That may sound a little dramatic to anyone who doesn’t spend Sunday afternoon driving a 3,500-pound race car around a concrete canyon at 120 mph.
To Wallace, it makes perfect sense.
And the performance wasn’t just about him. Wallace pointed directly at the No. 23 team, which he credited with pushing him through the difficult days and continuing to believe in him.
“Where it starts is with this 23 team,” he said. “Man, they pushed me to be the absolute best. I fail them a lot, but they stick behind me. It’s super cool.”
That’s probably the most revealing part of the afternoon.
Wallace may not like New Hampshire. His car may not have liked New Hampshire. His left-front tire certainly didn’t like New Hampshire.
But Wallace kept fighting anyway.
And that is why finishing second could somehow feel like a disappointment.
Because if you’re Bubba Wallace, apparently the only thing worse than driving a terrible car at a track you hate is doing all of that and discovering you were close enough to win.
Greg was a writer for DriveTribe supporting Amazon's The Grand Tour and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, and a Masters degree in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek and a regular contributor to Forbes.
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