Bubba Wallace bemoans disappointing Talladega finish, admits he made ‘a wrong call’
Bubba Wallace secured just a P23 finish at Talladega, where he won his first-ever Cup race.
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Bubba Wallace and Tyler ReddicK (Via IMAGO)
23XI Racing’s Bubba Wallace didn’t have the day he hoped for at Talladega. He and his teammate Tyler Reddick got buried due to lap traffic. The Toyota team’s plan to draft together to ensure one of their cars was in the victory lane played a role in their drop to the back. He also admitted that the final pit stop didn’t go as planned for him.
While discussing the P23 finish, he pointed out that 23XI Racing needs to asses the result and find what went wrong. With the position they found themselves in after a not-so-good pit stop and lack of proper execution, he is now in a place where another clutch performance is demanded from him yet again.
“Not the day that we needed. We put ourselves behind working on a plan, which plans are great with your teammates, but I felt like it hurt us to start. We got buried in track position, and you had to fight and claw your way back up to the top …then we gave it away on the last pit stop. Not what we needed. Obviously, we had this one circled as a good weekend for us but just didn’t execute,” Wallace told NBC.
Wallace is nine points off the cutline. If not for his impressive performance last week at Texas that saw him start at the pole and lead a career-best 111 laps, he would’ve been in the danger zone. He now has to show the same resilience he showed in the final two road course races of the regular season at ROVAL and produce his career-best to thrive.
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Tyler Reddick says 23XI didn’t have the advantage they usually have on Talladega
Just like Wallace, Reddick was also on a mission to secure a solid finish that could’ve ensured him some point buffer going into ROVAL. The P16 finished driver admitted that for some odd reason, the team failed to have the same advantage a story usually does at the track and didn’t have the cleanest day he had hope four.
“We really didn’t have the cleanest day. Just seemed like, for whatever reason, with the cycles and everything, we just didn’t have our normal advantage. … We were just kind of boxed in on the last restart, and just nothing went anywhere,” Reddick said.
Unlike in the case of Wallace, Reddick has the best chance in the bottom four of the R-12 to make it out at ROVAL. Road Course races are his bread and butter. He is arguably the best in such track in the garage, and the Toyota’s RC program has been solid the whole year.
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Justin P Joy
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