Bubba Wallace climbed out of the No. 23 car in Indianapolis on Sunday, pumped his fists, found his family and savored every precious moment of a historic Brickyard 400 victory. "This one's really cool," he said later. "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." The 31-year-old Wallace overcame a tenuous 18-minute rain delay, two tantalizing overtimes, fuel fears, and the hard-charging defending champ, Kyle Larson, 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, the AP reports, and Formula 1 raced on the track's road course.
It was Wallace's third career NASCAR Cup victory and first in the series' four crown jewel events that include 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. The final gap was 0.222 seconds, but that was no measure of the drama. 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.
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 he needed to surrender the lead and refuel. In Wallace's mind, per the AP, there was no choice. He beat Larson off the restart again and pulled away. "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."
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