Bubba is the only black driver in the category, standard bearer of Michael Jordan’s team. Kyle, defending champion, was suspended from the championship in 2020 for racist slurs. Yesterday the first got angry at a maneuver of the other, bumped him and then confronted and pushed him repeatedly
Barrel on the track. In an unequal battle, as well as certainly not very edifying. After a not exactly accidental incident Bubba Wallace confronted Kyle Larson and repeatedly pushed him. It happened yesterday in Las Vegas, in a Nascar playoff race, in which the two were on track even if with no hope of being able to fight for the title, both of whom were eliminated. There should therefore have been no particular animosity. Although it might be useful to reconstruct a couple of passages of the curricula of both.
Larson disqualified for racism in 2020
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Kyle Larson is the reigning Nascar champion, defending champion, since, as mentioned, he no longer has a chance to defend his title. He is someone who has won 18 Cup Series races (the first class of Nascar) in his career. But he is also one who in April 2020, in full lockdown, in an online virtual race managed to insult an interlocutor with racist epithets. So as to be disqualified for the whole season. Another peculiarity: he is the only Nascar pilot of Japanese origin, his maternal grandparents, Japanese who emigrated to the USA, during the Second World War were interned in a camp for internal enemies.
Wallace, the only black
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Bubba Wallace is the only black NASCAR driver. Since last year he has been racing for the 23XI, the team of Michael Jordan (and Denny Hamlin, his owner in the team and rival on the track…). This year he won his first race of him, in Kansas City. Activist of Black Lives Matter, he told in a dramatic interview the death of his cousin, who was shot during a police check. He fought against the Confederate flags on the Nascar circuits. He has been at the center of many controversial episodes, including the famous one about a noose in his garage. Discovery that had been read as a threat, only to later verify that the dismal knotted rope had been in that box for some time. Likewise, in those days when Bubba was on the front line against Confederate symbols, the story had given the idea of the climate around him.
The dynamics
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Now it is not certain that this intersection of precedents has anything to do with yesterday’s scuffle. But they certainly give it an extra meaning. Wallace in his red Toyota with McDonald’s brands had won the first stage. And he had driven in all for 29 laps. When Larson with his blue Chevrolet pulled him up and squeezed against the outside barriers. “At that point I knew he was going to take revenge,” Larson explained after the race. A good prediction: Wallace chased his rival in the lower part of the track and hit him on the right side. “Not intentionally,” he said.
The fight
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The result was that they both turned around, crashed and their race ended there. Then Wallace went to explain himself in his own way. And another kind of duel began.
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