Bubba Wallace sees a path to the Championship Four: 'If I don't do anything dumb'
Coming into the NASCAR Playoffs as the 16th man out of 16 can be daunting. Bubba Wallace doesn’t seem worried, though. Wallace and the No. 23 team don’t feel like the 16th-place team. In fact, they see a path to the Championship 4, if they can buckle down.
To close out the regular season, Bubba Wallace picked up stage points almost at will in the final seven weeks or so. However, it didn’t result in much other than his last top-10 coming at New Hampshire.
The good news, Wallace has shown massive improvement on short tracks as well as road courses. Not just that, he’s honed his awesome skills on restarts and has qualified very well in that seven-week timespan.
For these reasons and more, Bubba Wallace doesn’t feel like the 16th-best team.
“Well, if I don’t do anything dumb, I hope to be racing at Phoenix, right?” Wallace said during media days. “Don’t miss any weeks, no vacation. I think we are a lot better than 16th. I look at this first round, as one of the strongest of any of the top 16. Darlington, we ran fourth in the spring, Kansas, we know we can do Kansas. Bristol, Bristol we need a little more magic there, but top-10 car.
“Second round is where we are starting to work on that. Texas, we’ve been okay at. Talladega style is, Talladega, and then the ROVAL. We ran top 10 at, but don’t feel good about that one. Then the third round, I feel pretty good. So if we can do what we know how to do in the first round and maintain or do some stuff in the second round, there is no reason we can’t be top eight, top four. I really feel good about that, but definitely not a 16th-place car.”
In this first round specifically, Bubba Wallace might have the best chance out of the bottom four drivers to make the Round of 12. And for what it is worth, I think he’s right. The second round offers the most issues. Once you get to the Round of 8, anything can happen.
Why Bubba Wallace should have confidence in Round One
There is a lot more than just a couple of races earlier this season to prove Wallace has improved this year. During his push to the playoffs, Wallace had to points race a lot more than he might have liked.
The thing that they had to do in order to hold off other drivers on the bubble – was qualify well and race smart. A DNF would have been catastrophic in the last two months of the season.
In the last seven weeks of the regular season, Bubba Wallace was the definition of consistency. However, he couldn’t put it all together for a great finish.
With an average starting position of 9.8 and a finishing position of 13.0, and 101 laps led in those seven weeks – there is room to improve. Clearly, there is more work to do at the end of the races. But keeping yourself level and avoiding those P20, P25-type finishes is important in the playoffs.
I expect the 23 team to pull out all of the stops. Maybe we see them act more conservatively at Darlington in the Cook Out Southern 500. However, the Kansas race is their shot, they have to make the most of it.