At the dawn of the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series season, Bubba Wallace stood confident after earning his first top-10 points finish in 2023 despite his elimination in the Round of 12.
Though he left the 36-race slate without visiting victory lane, the 30-year-old driver established himself as a threat for years to come by flashing the consistency necessary to compete deep into the postseason.
Pedestrian performances at the truncated LA Clash and the Bluegreen Vacation Duels saddled Wallace with a 24th-place starting spot for the Great American Race.
Poor starting positions often fail to hold back elite superspeedway racers, and Wallace falls into that category, hopping into the top-10 to collect stage points in both stages. His McDonalds Camry cruised into the top-10 late in the race, managing to dodge the major multi-car melee that came with less than 10 laps to go.
When the checkered and yellow flags flew, Wallace’s #23 Toyota ended the night with a fantastic fifth-place result, his third top-5 in the sport’s biggest showcase.
Despite getting pulled into an incident on lap 2, Wallace secured points in stage 1 before wrangling his wrecked race car to fifth for a second straight race.
Rolling into Vegas with momentum and a top-5 starting spot, Bubba and company thought they had a chance to snag a trio of great finishes to start the year, but a stubborn wheel nut refused to dislodge itself from the hub, taking the 23XI entry out of contention.
Mediocre performances at Phoenix and Bristol provoked the hungry racer to log a great qualifying effort at COTA where he put his car 10th on the grid. It was quickly undone by Corey Lajoie slamming into him on the backstretch on lap 1, but the Alabama native rebounded to 15th place.
Another trip to the second round of qualifying at Richmond gave Bubba a great vantage point heading into turn 1 when the race started on rain tires. The grizzled veteran adapted to the new conditions better than most, ending stage 1 in second before falling back to eighth by the end of stage 2.
As the race neared its end, Wallace closed in stage 1 winner Kyle Larson. With two laps to go, Larson got loose on the exit of turn 4 and overcorrected his Chevy into Wallace’s Toyota, spinning Larson into the soggy Richmond infield.
Instead of getting a renewed chance to fight for the win with fresh tires, Wallace’s pit crew let him down, sinking him to the back of the lead-lap drivers and finishing 13th.
The seventh-year Cup racer rebounded from the disappointment with a front-row start for the next race at Martinsville where Wallace got second in both stages before ending the day in fourth.
A third-straight top-10 start put Bubba near the front at Texas, allowing him to pick up points in both stages. Crew chief Bootie Barker elected to keep his driver on the track following the second stage, and it nearly backfired in the worst possible way.
Battling for the top spot with Chase Briscoe, Wallace’s car stumbled over TMS’ wicked bumps in turn 3, turning Wallace and Briscoe in one fell swoop. Luckily, both drivers avoided any additional damage, leading to both bouncing back for top-10s.
Talladega ended in a shower of sparks as John Hunter Nemechek’s poorly-timed push KO’d several Toyota teammates, including Wallace who ended the day 36th. This was followed up by a Dover race that he also didn’t finish, getting knocked out in a crash with Christopher Bell and William Byron in the final stage.
Returning to the site of his most-recent win, Wallace turned in a dud at Kansas, notching no stage points and coming home a disappointing 17th before taking his McDonalds Camry to a much-needed top-10 at Darlington the following week.
Wallace drove himself into the All-Star Race at North Wilkesboro where he came home with another top-5. Though he pushed his car into the top-5 in the second stage at the World 600, Bubba’s car faded in the first half of stage 3 where the race was ultimately called, leaving him with an 11th-place finish.
The month of June was not exactly kind to Wallace as suboptimal runs at Gateway, Sonoma, and Iowa started to knock him out of the points race for the Playoffs, but a trip to Loudon could have been the cure for his woes as it had been the last two times.
Noah Gragson squashed those hopes for Wallace with 36 laps to go when the #10 Ford biffed it on the entry to turn 1, collecting the #23 and several others. It was Bubba’s fifth race where he earned 10 points or less.
An utterly goofy race took Wallace from a midpack performance to a top-10 result as cars ahead of him fell off the pace from crashes or not enough fuel, and the Cup Series hosted a second-consecutive silly race on the streets of Chicago when they attempted to charge 40 cars into a deluge at the beginning of the second stage.
The result? Eventual race winner Alex Bowman played involuntary pinball with his competitors, looping Wallace around in front of Daniel Suárez. The contact gave Bowman the opportunity to stay up front and continue while Bubba had to fight back through the entire field on a narrow street circuit.
Seeing another Playoff bubble driver score a win was bad enough for Wallace as his hopes for a postseason bid kept shrinking, but the winner being the guy that ruined his good day was a bridge too far. Wallace expressed his displeasure with Bowman post-race, nudging the winner into the wall on the cooldown lap.
Social media “outrage” led to Wallace getting slapped with a $50K fine from NASCAR prior the series’ annual trip to the Tricky Triangle where the Toyota driver took his weak race car all the way to a 10th-place result in Pocono before the series’ return to another famous superspeedway.
Having planted his flag as a threat on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway oval with top-10s in 2019 and 2020, Wallace embraced the challenge of racing there with the NextGen car, locking down his lone 2024 stage win in stage 2 before wheeling his Air Force Toyota to fifth when the checkered and yellow flags waved.
An eighth-place starting spot at the second Richmond bode well for the flagship 23XI team, and the results seemed to follow with Bubba nabbing points in both stages. Those points came in vain as Wallace got a great view of another non-Playoff driver punching their ticket to the postseason when he finished fourth that night.
The next week at Michigan represented Wallace’s best opportunity to make a statement with time running out on his Playoff chances. After starting fifth, Wallace moved to the lead on lap 35 once he passed car owner Denny Hamlin, who promptly spun himself out.
The ill-timed caution brought much of the field down pit road where Wallace won the race off, but he failed to reach the front in the final four laps of stage 1. The stage break brought more cars back to pit road where the running order received another shake-up.
A confusing caution near the end of stage 2 forced the frontrunners down pit road again; this is where the trouble found Bubba. Kyle Larson shoved his car into a place it aerodynamically couldn’t handle in turn 3 on the restart, causing the 2021 champion to spin out in front of most of the field.
The first car the #5 made contact with just so happened to be the #23. While the damage didn’t look terribly severe on the surface, the repairs weren’t enough to return the car to its previous shape, dropping Wallace from a potential top-5 down to 26th as his teammate Tyler Reddick grabbed his second win of 2024.
Prior powerful performances at Daytona gave Wallace fans confidence he would punch his Playoff ticket with a victory at the World Center of Racing. As the laps wound down, it looked like he was in position to make the most of the opportunity until Michael McDowell and Joey Logano triggered a massive pileup with seven to go.
Wallace withstood the damage from the accident, staying on track to scoop up a sixth-place result, but Harrison Burton’s victory put him in an awful points situation heading into the regular season finale at The Lady in Black.
Bubba made history by becoming the first Black driver to take the pole for the Southern 500 where his Air Force Camry paced the field for 37 laps before getting wiped out in a late accident that relegated him to 16th in the race. To make matters worse, yet another non-Playoff driver won, knocking him out of the title fight.
Bubba’s Playoffs were relatively quiet. Round one saw him fail to compete in Atlanta and Watkins Glen, but a stirring performance at Bristol ended with Wallace occupying the shortest step on the podium.
Another poor showing from 23XI at Kansas preceded a pair of ninth-place finishes at Talladega and the Roval to round out the second Playoff round. Stage points at Vegas and Homestead didn’t translate to great finishes, so Bubba and the crew hoped that a trip to the Xfinity 500 in the Xfinity car would play out well.
What unfolded instead was a race manipulation scandal that Bubba might have been involved in where his Camry fell off the pace in the final five laps, which gave Christopher Bell the opportunity to pass Wallace in the final corner to lock himself into the Championship Four at Phoenix.
That was the scenario until Bell was deemed to have “run the wall” like Ross Chastain did two years prior, eliminating him from the final race and leaving Wallace with a 50-point penalty as well.
The Phoenix finale proved fruitful for the #23 team as Bubba replicated his effort from the previous year, bringing home a seventh-place result to finish the 2024 season.
What Went Wrong
The #23 team lost momentum with that botched tire job in Las Vegas and just never got it back in the first year of Toyota’s new Camry XSE model while teammate Tyler Reddick cruised to a regular-season title.
Wallace missed the postseason by 30 points, but he never really had a shot at many wins in the regular season, instead making the most out of mediocre-to-bad days. A perfect example of this came at Pocono where the car handled poorly in qualifying and throughout the day before Bubba wrapped the day up in the top-10.
Contrary to Buescher, Bubba wasn’t starved for stage points, collecting them in 17 of the 26 regular-season events with almost half of those (8) seeing him earn points in both stages.
What this shows is that Bootie Barker knows how to set up a race car well, though his in-race adjustments (or lack thereof) appear to hamper the team over a full 400-mile race.
The #23 team failed to produce race-winning speed consistently enough to contend for wins, so when they were earning stage points, they weren’t translating into great finishes, such as the first Richmond race.
When your lone teammate makes the title race while you’re on the outside looking in, it’s time to make changes to the team, and 23XI elected to move Barker to an administrative role in favor of a new crew chief.
Looking Ahead to 2025
Before the conclusion of the 2024 season, 23XI Racing announced the acquisition of Truck Series crew chief Charles Denike to take over for Bootie Barker on top of the #23 team’s pit box for 2025 and beyond.
Add to that the ongoing court case between 23XI, Front Row Motorsports, and NASCAR as well as a new full-time teammate for Wallace and Reddick in Riley Herbst, and the now three-car outfit looks much different going into 2025.
In Herbst’s limited Cup starts with FRM and Rick Ware Racing, the 26-year-old racer flashed potential as a great superspeedway racer but not much else. His first year in Cup is shaping up to be a bit of a challenge, but having teammates like Wallace and Reddick should help him along in due time.
A third full-time car means the team’s resources will be spread more thin, which could adversely affect Wallace at some of his weaker race tracks like Gateway and the road courses, but a second year behind the wheel of the Camry XSE should inspire more confidence in Bubba now that he has a frame of reference at each track.
Much of Bubba’s issues revolve around early-season performance where 23XI struggles to get out of the gate as an organization. As they enter their fifth year in the Cup Series, that cycle must end at some point.
Always a threat at superspeedway tracks and short tracks that require tire management, Wallace could book himself a trip to the Playoffs as early as Daytona as long as he can keep the #23 up at the front.
Since we’ve never seen Wallace play around with “house money”, it would be interesting to see what that could do for his team and, more importantly, his confidence throughout the regular season. Looking back at last year, an early win in Atlanta allowed Daniel Suárez and his team to experiment a ton in the first 26 races.
It all comes down to how well Denike and Wallace gel at the end of the day.
If Denike’s prowess for setups on short tracks translates to the Cup level, I imagine Bubba contending at Martinsville, New Hampshire, and Phoenix, the latter of which could open the door for them to potentially compete for a title.
Something I’d like to see from the #23 team is competing at any road course on speed. It appears they had the potential to do this at Chicago before the incident, so I’d like to see them make their own luck on tracks with both left and right turns.
Races Bubba Could Win: Daytona 500, spring Martinsville, Coca-Cola 600, Roval
(Top Photo Credit: John Raoux/AP Photo)
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