In-Season Challenge<\/a> opponents last week, the two spoke shortly after the race ended to clear the air, with Wallace assuring Bowman there were no hard feelings after the dustup.<\/p>\n\u201cI think the media definitely wanted that to go in a direction that it didn\u2019t go,\u201d Bowman said. \u201cYeah, we talked after the race and I saw him the other night at dinner. I think we\u2019re all good. Like, I certainly hate that he got wrecked. I don\u2019t think that much contact was necessary in that situation. But I also understand that he\u2019s trying to race for the bracket challenge and finish the best he can. Kind of is what it is. And he bought me dinner the other night, so we\u2019re good. I\u2019ll move on from it.\u201d<\/p>\n
On-track rivals in NASCAR frequently tend to find each other after recent incidents. That proved true again Thursday when the two wound up at the same restaurant for a meal.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe get to the hotel for dinner two nights ago now, and he\u2019s waiting to get seated right in front of us,\u201d Wallace recalled. \u201cI just come up, give a big bear hug and told him again, \u2018Hey, we\u2019re good. Nothing\u2019s wrong.\u2019 And so the hotel we\u2019re at, a lot of (NASCAR) industry people are there. My dinner was bought by somebody else, so I paid for Bowman\u2019s dinner. It just kind of felt right.\u201d<\/p>\n
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What was a battle for seventh place ultimately plummeted Wallace to 28th, five laps down. Wallace, who apologized to his team this week, is two points above the provisional elimination line in the 16-driver Cup Series Playoffs grid entering Sunday\u2019s race at Sonoma (3:30 p.m. ET, TNT Sports\/truTV, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).<\/p>\n
\u201cI was thinking about that, I was thinking about the In-Season [Challenge],\u201d Wallace said. \u201cLike, instead, at the end of the day, I gave up 20- something points, and look where I\u2019m at: plus-two. So yeah, it\u2019s just going through it. Like I felt like that was my debut race. Rookie mentality. And it was like, what the [expletive] are you doing?\u201d<\/p>\n
Wallace admitted it took a few days to forgive himself for the error at Chicago. In years past, those few days may have lingered into the weekend or longer. That wasn\u2019t the case this time around.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo start, it was the same,\u201d Wallace said. \u201cLike Monday, Tuesday, I was pretty down \u2014 and mad at myself, right? And then like, oops \u2014 I made a mistake doing something else around the house. And it\u2019s like the magnitude is different, but still, a mistake\u2019s a mistake, so you just move on. It\u2019s been fine the last couple days. But yeah, I would say it\u2019d be totally different last year.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SONOMA, Calif. \u2014 Last weekend, Bubba Wallace was sliding backwards down DuSable Lake Shore Drive in Chicago after…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":60654,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5124],"tags":[35119,22019,960,5386,1818,35368],"class_list":{"0":"post-60653","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago","8":"tag-alex-bowman","9":"tag-bubba-wallace","10":"tag-chicago","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-illinois","13":"tag-sonoma-raceway"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114842574752342229","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60653\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}