Wallace content with top-10 run at WWTR despite restart issue

Bubba Wallace could have potentially won Sunday at World Wide Technology Raceway, but he also could have ended up wrecked when a restart went haywire because of a gear issue.

In the end, he finished eighth, and although it came with a touch of frustration, it was a win in the bigger picture. Wallace and his 23XI Racing team are within reach of advancing into the second round of the NASCAR Cup Series postseason after back-to-back top-10 finishes.

“We’re plus 50 (points); that’s a good sight to see,” Wallace said. “We had solid execution all day, varying strategies from the whole field, and my little restart mishap. It just got stuck in between gears, and that hurt me, [Kyle Larson and William Byron] on strategy, so I hate that for all of us involved.

“But we recovered. Looking at the big picture, if you had told me that we would lead laps and be one of the cars to maybe win today after practice, I would have said, ‘[Heck] no.’ All in all, a solid day for the McDonald’s Toyota Camry team. We just came up short.”

The gear issue – it got stuck on the lap 156 restart – occurred while Wallace was leading. He was in the outside lane when it happened, which stacked up the line behind him, but fortunately did not cause a crash. It did, however, hand over control of the race to Joey Logano and Denny Hamlin.

“I did it the restart before and it was fine,” Wallace said. “I need to go back and study how to do it better, but I hate it because I don’t know if it gave [Larson] damage, but we were solid cars. It was just not needed.”

A caution on the same lap as the restart and his mishap brought Wallace and some others down pit road. The strategy might have worked for that group to cycle back toward the top of the leaderboard, given the fuel run, but one more caution on the afternoon evened out the field. Wallace never led the race again.

“Oh, for sure that [gear issue] definitely changed things because we pit there for just fuel only, and I think we were going to be OK if the race played out,” he said. “But that last caution (with 33 laps to go) was kind of the kicker, so some things to look at.

“To be frustrated knowing that we could have won is nice because I didn’t have that feeling yesterday. All in all, I’m happy for our team.”

Wallace led 73 laps, the second-most of any driver, and won the second stage. In two postseason races, Wallace and his team have earned 85 points and are fourth on the provisional playoff grid with one race remaining in the round.