Ryan Flores: Bubba Wallace isn't helping himself
The big news in NASCAR this week came down in the middle of the week, when Bubba Wallace was fined $50,000 by the organization for slamming into Grant Park 165 winner Alex Bowman after the race during a cool-down lap.
It has sparked plenty of discussion in NASCAR circles, in part because the incident doesn’t really fit with who Wallace says he wants to be as a driver.
“That’s what I wonder with Bubba, like OK, is there more underlying circumstances that have happened with the 48 this year?” NASCAR tire changer and co-host of the Stacking Pennies podcast Ryan Flores said. “Is that why he’s so frustrated? But still it’s a tough look to run into the leader two hours after it happens. It’s like, ‘Ah, all right, man, that could have been a phone call.'”
The incident with Bubba Wallace also occurred at a time when folks couldn’t help but talk about it. There was nothing else going on, with Bowman set to celebrate his victory in the Grant Park 165.
As Flores points out, that was simply the wrong time to create beef if Wallace was trying to avoid being in the news with negative headlines.
“I guess my point is Bubba gets a lot of bad press, and he is pretty outspoken about how he gets bad press and that he doesn’t like it, but then he doesn’t really put himself in position to be successful when you run into the leader two hours after he spins you out,” Flores said. “So that’s where I feel like sometimes he can help himself.”
Because of the way Bubba Wallace went about the earlier incident, where Bowman made a mistake and got into Wallace, spinning him out and effectively ruining his race, everyone is now talking about it.
And Wallace, in part, comes across looking like the bad guy, even with Bowman advocating for no NASCAR penalty and apologizing for the issue.
“Now it’s opened up for everybody, for us to be talking about it,” Flores said. “Before it’s the 48’s the bad guy for spinning him out. Now it’s, well, now we have to sit here. If he listened to this he’d be pissed off we’re talking about it, but now we have to talk about it because it’s a big storyline where it didn’t have to be. So that’s the point I think that is trying to be made by people a lot of times with Darrell is like, ‘Hey man, I get that you get bad press, but that could have been a phone call.'”