Bubba Wallace Comes Clean on His Own Shortcomings Amidst Stalled Championship Goal

Bubba Wallace came into 2026 wanting to win a championship. Halfway through the season, he has zero wins, is 11th in the standings, and he’s starting Sunday’s race at Pocono from dead last after wrecking in qualifying. Before the race, he sat down and made a quiet but certain admission.

“We’ve got a long way to get there.”

“Our mindset going into this year was to compete for a championship, and we still have a long way to go. We’ve got a long way to get there, especially with the way the 45 and the 11 are running.”

The #45 is his own teammate, Tyler Reddick, who is leading the entire Cup Series with five wins and 669 points. Bubba Wallace has zero wins and 378 points. Reddick is comfortably in the playoffs. Wallace is still grinding to point his way in. He did not make excuses for it either.

“I feel like I’ve taken a step up in performance and in all the areas where a driver needs to deliver, and the results haven’t really shown it yet. That’s been a little frustrating. But it’s racing. It’s hard. It’s never supposed to be easy.”

“I’ve experienced just about the worst it can get.”@BubbaWallace does not remember how hard his hit was at Pocono back in 2018.

He also talks about San Diego and remainder of the regular season expectations. #NASCAR | #Pocono | @MtrsprtsToday pic.twitter.com/VjA8QPyPQD

— Tim Moore (@IveBeenTimMoore) June 13, 2026

The numbers actually back his frustration. He has led 98 laps this season and posted two top-fives. The speed is present. What keeps disappearing is the clean air at the end of races. At Talladega, he started fourth, was running up front, and finished 36th after a late crash. At Darlington, he started 2nd, only to finish 34th. Martinsville, 36th again. Nashville, caught in a Hocevar-triggered wreck, 32nd. Every time a good result was within reach, something took it away.

Then Saturday at Pocono added one more thing to that list. Entering the tight Tunnel Turn during qualifying, the No. 23 Toyota snapped sideways and hit the inside wall. The car was done. The team rolled out a backup, which wiped all his lap times and sent him to 38th on the grid. He will start last on Sunday in a car that has not been set up specifically for this track.

Pocono is a complicated territory for him. He grabbed a fifth here in June 2021, 23XI’s first-ever top-five as a team. He ran a tenth in 2024 and generally qualifies well. But this place also gave him the hardest crash of his career.

In his 2018 rookie season, on Lap 154 of the Gander Outdoors 400, the front brake rotor exploded. The pedal went straight to the floor at 200 mph, entering Turn 1. He steered left into the grass to scrub speed, slid sideways, and hit the wall passenger-side. Collapsed getting out of the car. He was asked about the G-forces from that hit on Saturday and admitted he does not even know what they measured.

“It can’t get any worse than my rookie year when that happened,” he said. “I’ve experienced just about the worst it can get. So anything else, it’s like, oh, okay.”

What Bubba Wallace Told Carson Hocevar, and Where That Lesson Came From

A week ago at Michigan, Wallace finished third, his best result all season. Before that happened, Hocevar caused a nine-car wreck on Lap 83 that knocked out Tyler Reddick, Wallace’s teammate and the points leader, for his first DNF of the year. Wallace got caught in it but survived with minor damage and eventually came through to third. After the race, Bubba Wallace pulled Hocevar aside on the pit wall. It was animated. He explained exactly what he said.

“I said, ‘I’m jealous of how fast you are, kid.’ But at the same time, Kevin Harvick told me, whenever I was hitting stuff four or five years ago, he said, ‘Stop hitting stuff, and your finishes will show.’ And that’s what I simply tried to tell him.”

He kept going. “He’s fast, he’s going for every move every second, and it’s not worth it. He’s creating a lot of enemies. But I just told him, you’re fast, a lot of us are jealous of what you have, but we’re beating you because we can put a race together better than you.”

Hocevar sat there, nodded, and told reporters afterward he got the point, he tried for two spots instead of one, and the stack-up surprised him. Richard Petty has already compared Hocevar to a young Dale Earnhardt, saying Earnhardt never made friends either, but eventually learned to get away with it.

Bubba Wallace lived that same phase. He heard it from Harvick. He adjusted. Now he is the one passing it forward, while simultaneously trying to find the consistency he is preaching, starting from the back at a track that already broke him once.

The post Bubba Wallace Comes Clean on His Own Shortcomings Amidst Stalled Championship Goal appeared first on EssentiallySports.