He deserved minute of it.<\/p>\n
The 31-year-old Wallace overcame a tenuous 18-minute rain delay, two tantalizing overtimes, fears about running out of fuel late and the hard-charging defending race champ, Kyle Larson<\/a>, on back-to-back restarts to become the first Black driver to win a major race on Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s 2.5-mile oval. No Black driver has won the Indianapolis 500, and Formula 1 raced on the track’s road course.<\/p>\n “This one’s really cool,” Wallace said. “Coming off Turn 4, I knew I was going to get there — unless we ran out of gas. I was surprised I wasn’t crying like a little baby.”<\/p>\n His third career NASCAR Cup victory delivered Wallace’s first victory in the series’ four crown jewel events, the others being the Daytona 500, Coca-Cola 600 and Southern 500. It also snapped a 100-race winless streak that dated to 2022 at Kansas and locked up a playoff spot. His only other win came at Talladega in 2021.<\/p>\n The final gap was 0.222 seconds, but that was no measure of the consternation he faced.<\/p>\n Larson cut a 5.057-second deficit with 14 laps to go to about three seconds with six laps left as the yellow flag came out for the rain. The cars then rolled to a stop on pit lane with four laps remaining, forcing Wallace to think and rethink his restart strategy.<\/p>\n “The whole time I’m thinking are we going? Are we not?” he said. “I will say I leaned more towards ‘I know we’re going to go back racing. Be ready. Don’t get complacent here.”<\/p>\n Wallace made sure of it.<\/p>\n He beat Larson through the second turn on the first restart only to have a crash behind him force a second overtime, forcing his crew to recalculate whether they had enough fuel to finish the race or whether he needed to surrender the lead and refuel.<\/p>\n In Wallace’s mind, there was no choice.<\/p>\n “The first thing that went through my mind was, ‘Here we go again,'” he said. “But then I said, `I want to win this straight up. I want to go back racing.’ Here we are.”<\/p>\n He beat Larson off the restart again and pulled away, preventing Larson from becoming the race’s fourth back-to-back winner.<\/p>\n The victory also alleviated the frustration Wallace felt Saturday when he spent most of the qualifying session on the provisional pole only to see Chase Briscoe<\/a> claim the No. 1 starting spot with one of the last runs in the session.<\/p>\n On Sunday, he made sure there was no repeat, providing an added boost to the 23XI Racing team co-owned by basketball Hall of Famer Michael Jordan<\/a> and last week’s race winner, Denny Hamlin<\/a>, as it continues to battle NASCAR in court over its charter status.<\/p>\n “Those last 20 laps there were ups and downs and I was telling myself ‘You won’t be able to do it,'” Wallace said. “Once I’d seen it was Larson, I knew he won here last year and he’s arguably the best in the field. So to beat the best, we had to be the best today.”<\/p>\n The other big race — the In-Season Challenge — went to Ty Gibbs<\/a>, who had a better car than Ty Dillon<\/a> in qualifying and on race day. Gibbs finished 21st to win the inaugural March Madness-like single-elimination tournament and collect the $1 million prize.<\/p>\n Dillon, a surprise championship round entrant after making the field as the 32nd and final driver, finished 28th.<\/p>\n “They brought me money guns and they jammed so I decided to take all the money and throwing it to the fans and they were all wrestling and fighting over it,” said Gibbs, who also received a title belt and a ring. “But it’s super cool. It’s a cool opportunity.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jul 27, 2025, 06:22 PM ET INDIANAPOLIS — Bubba Wallace climbed out of the No. 23 car Sunday,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":98021,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[51,50,52],"class_list":{"0":"post-98020","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-stories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114928009221200210","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98020","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=98020"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98020\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Bubba Wallace’s Brickyard 400 win is his first at one of NASCAR\u2019s four crown jewel races.\u00a0Justin Casterline\/Getty Images<\/p>\n