Even after the COVID-19 pandemic forced NASCAR to pause its 2020 racing season for two months, Bubba Wallace had a breakout year in 2020.
In early June, during the national protests over the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, Wallace, the only Black full-time driver in the NASCAR Cup Series, went on CNN and called for his sport to ban Confederate flags, which have been seen at NASCAR events for years. Two days later, NASCAR did it.
Later in June, before the start of the Geico 500 race at Talladega Speedway in Alabama, a member of Wallace’s racing team found what looked like a noose hanging in Wallace’s racing stall. The race was delayed one day due to lightning, and before the start of the race on Monday, the entire field of drivers made a public display of support by pushing Wallace’s car to the starting line. By Tuesday, the FBI announced that its investigation found the rope had appeared in the stall months before it was ever assigned to Wallace, so it was not a hate crime. That didn’t lessen the show of unity from drivers when everyone believed a hate crime had occurred.
Wallace became a media sensation, and adapted to “intense scrutiny,” as NASCAR EVP Daryl Wolfe put it. Once NASCAR began allowing a limited number of fans at its 2020 races, many new fans appeared who said they had never followed the sport until learning about Wallace.
“One thing that motivates me to get next year going is that I became a household name off the racetrack,” Wallace told Yahoo Finance in an extensive interview this week. “And it’s like, man, I want to become a household name on the racetrack. For the success we have.”
That’s not to say Wallace didn’t race well in 2020. He had his best season ever, with five top-10 finishes, including finishing 5th at Daytona. But in 112 Cup Series races, he’s never won one.
“There’s a lot of pressure on me to go out and perform and compete, so I’m excited about that,” he says. “I think if you look at everything that was thrown at me this year, I can just up about manage my way through any rough traffic and handle the weight of that.”
In the 2021 NASCAR season, which starts in February at Daytona, he’ll get his chance—under the banner of a new racing team.
Big sponsors, lured by social justice message
In September, Wallace announced the formation of a new single-car NASCAR team backed by Michael Jordan and Denny Hamlin. The team name, 23XI (“twenty-three eleven”) is a nod to Jordan’s NBA No. 23 and Hamlin’s Toyota car No. 11. This week, the team announced a slew of new sponsors: McDonald’s; newly public DoorDash; Columbia Sportswear, Dr. Pepper, and Root Insurance. Add those to the personal endorsement deals Wallace racked up this summer from Beats By Dre, Square Cash App, PSD Underwear, Kingsford, and Urban Outfitters.
23XI has a stated goal of spurring social change beyond the racetrack, and Wallace says that’s bringing in sponsors.
“As much as it’s important for having the on-track branding and the financial support coming through, it’s more important for what’s going on off the racetrack: making a positive impact and sharing our beliefs in social activism and racial equality, and making this world a better place,” he says. “So every partner we announced, every brand, that’s what they’re most keen on... That was the gist of every conversation. And then we’d be like, ‘Well, hey, we race cars for a living and we need financial support,’ and they would say, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s obviously a given. But what are we going to do to grow our brands together to create and keep pushing real change and keep pushing the envelope of racial equality?’”
NASCAR’s evolving ‘politics’
Wallace has a response to NASCAR fans that have criticized the Confederate flag ban and complained that the sport has gone political. (Even President Trump tweeted in July that the noose “hoax” and Confederate flag ban “has caused lowest ratings EVER,” which was not true—in fact, NASCAR TV ratings overall for its 2020 season dipped just 2% compared to much larger ratings declines for most of the other sports leagues this summer and fall.)
“It’s not political,” Wallace says. “It’s doing the right thing. If politics is doing the right thing, okay, but it’s not. People, they look to athletes, they look to us, as their entertainment, their escape from the real world. Well, the real world is affecting the athletes. It’s affecting us, and we have to stand up for that. We want to make this a better place for everybody. It’s not just like we live a lavish lifestyle, and we avoid all these topics. No. These are topics that relate directly to us—in my sport it’s not as much to everybody as it is to me—but throughout all sports, we want to be on the right side of change and the right side of history.”
And Wallace cites a specific role model in his recent efforts to bring awareness to racial justice: seven-time Formula One world champion driver Lewis Hamilton. The two have become close friends in 2020.
“It’s really cool to be in communication with him,” Wallace says. “He’s a way much bigger activist than I am, across a ton of platforms. He stands up for racial equality. He pushes the whole community of F1 to do that. It motivates me to preach that same stuff to our drivers inside NASCAR, inside our four walls.”
—
Daniel Roberts is an editor-at-large at Yahoo Finance and specializes in sports business. Follow him on Twitter at @readDanwrite.
Read more:
What Michael Jordan and Bubba Wallace could do for NASCAR
NASCAR's only Black driver Bubba Wallace changed the sport forever in 2 days
What Chris Paul learned in the NBA bubble
Fox Sports host and former NFL player Emmanuel Acho: ‘I’m glad sports TV ratings are down’
New York Liberty CEO: 'The world wasn't quite ready' for the WNBA in the past
Reebok ends its CrossFit sponsorship over CrossFit CEO's tweet about George Floyd
Misty Copeland: George Floyd protests are ‘the first time I feel like I’m truly being heard’
