Bubba Wallace’s suspension for causing a three-car accident and shoving Kyle Larson is already over, with the controversial driver appearing at Martinsville following the one race suspension to a cacophony of boos from unhappy NASCAR fans.
Watch that here:
“Most boos in driver intros: Bubba Wallace, and it wasn’t very close (way more than Kyle Busch and Ty Gibbs).”
As you can hear in the video and see in Gluck’s caption, not only was Bubba booed when he appeared for the race, but the booing directed his way was far worse than the booing directed toward anyone else.
There are probably a couple of reasons behind the booing directed Wallace’s way.
For one, there’s sure to be a large degree of residual dislike and distrust felt toward Wallace because of the 2020 incident in which he got the FBI involved after claiming that a garage pulley in his garage was a noose, something that painted NASCAR as being racist and reactionary until the noose claim was disproven and it came out that all that was there was a garage door pulley.
Then there’s the recent incident in which he caused a three-car pileup and then, after the race, assaulted fellow driver Kyle Larson, shoving him.
Goose recently reported about that incident on Gen Z Conservative, saying:
Kyle Larson, driver of the number 5 car, made an aggressive move to pass Wallace, whose car was forced to scrape the wall. From that point forward, Wallace sought out the number 5 car and ended Kyle Larson’s race, by spinning him into the grass. That wreck ended the race of three drivers, totaling the cars of Larson, Wallace, and Christopher Bell, a third driver who saw his championship hopes decimated by the collision.
Wallace wasn’t finished there. After wrecking Larson and Bell, Wallace exited his vehicle that was still on the infield of the track, and hurried toward Larson, who looked to be a bit dazed after the hit he just took in his vehicle. Wallace then begins angrily shoving the chest of Larson, who did not want to be a part of any physical. As Larson tried to move away, Wallace continued forward yelling and shoving the much smaller driver.
Watch the incident here:
The NASCAR president noted the danger of what Wallace did in his comments on the subject of Wallace and his suspension, saying:
“Our actions are really specific to what took place on the race track. And when we look at how that incident occurred, in our minds, really a dangerous act.
“We thought that was intentional and put other competitors at risk. And as we look at the sport and where we are today and where we want to draw that line going forward, we thought that definitely crossed the line and that’s what we focused on in terms of making this call.”
He also spoke on Wallace’s post-race assault of Larson, saying:
“We don’t want to see drivers fighting. We understand that emotions get high. We don’t encourage that obviously. But our focus was really on the race track and we’ll have conversations about what took place outside the race car one-on-one and see where we go from there.”