Bubba Wallace speaks out about emotional toll of Talladega noose incident

Bubba Wallace opened up about the noose incident and the emotional toll it took on him. While appearing on The Breakfast Club, Wallace was asked if NASCAR had gotten to the bottom of the noose incident that happened at his garage stall at Talladega in 2020.

“It was there before we got there, years before we got there,” Wallace stated. “It was just a coincidence that I had that garage. It’s wild. It’s still a topic of discussion. You should see my Twitter mentions. …It’s wild that it’s still going about it. But it was there before we even got there, and just the one in a million coincidences that I had that garage stall.

“It was tied in a fashion like that, it could have been this small, it doesn’t matter. It is what it is. We’ve moved on from it, and it sucks that the sport was put in that situation, that I was put in that situation, our team was put in that situation. But we’ve learned a lot about who we are as a sport and who we are as competitors, and that’s all you can ask for.”

Bubba Wallace talks about the ‘rough’ experience after the noose incident

Wallace then revealed how much the noose incident impacted him emotionally. “A year or two after that was rough,” he said. I went from being one of the most favorable drivers, but now it’s just been the boos and stuff. That’s okay because it’s sports.

“I love going to college football games, Tennessee and college basketball games. I’m not a person that boos other teams because I’m kind of in the sports world myself, and it just kind of seems childish. But fans do what they want, so booing is a part of sports in general. The next week after Talladega was like, a light switch. It was like, whoa! Holy s***, I didn’t ask for this. Now they’re making noise.”

The noose incident happened on June 21, 2020, when a member of Wallace’s team reported to NASCAR that a noose was placed in the garage stall. Now-NASCAR commissioner Steve Phelps told Wallace, who said he was “incredibly saddened” by the incident. The next day, before the race, the drivers and crew members pushed Wallace’s car to the front of pit road to show solidarity. After an investigation by the FBI, it was determined that the alleged noose was a pull-down rope with a loop and had been in the garage since the fall Talladega race in 2019.