Wallace, William Darrell 'Bubba' Jr.

Impact on the world

Became, in 2013, the second Black driver ever to win a national NASCAR series race, taking the Camping World Truck Series Kroger 200 at Martinsville exactly fifty years after Wendell Scott, already profiled in this collection, became the first; he went on in 2018 to become the first African American full-time Cup Series driver since Scott, and on October 4, 2021, ended a 58-year drought since Scott's lone 1963 victory by winning at Talladega Superspeedway, his first career Cup win and the first for the newly formed 23XI Racing team co-owned by Michael Jordan and Denny Hamlin; the victory came roughly a year after a noose was discovered tied in his team's garage stall at the same Talladega track, an incident that prompted an FBI hate-crime investigation later determining the rope had been positioned as a garage door pull mechanism for months and predated the team's assignment to that specific stall, meaning Wallace was not the deliberate target of a hate crime, even as the discovery and his own advocacy directly preceded NASCAR's decision, made at his urging, to ban the Confederate flag from its events the same year.

Life & background

Born in Mobile, Alabama in 1993, Wallace began racing competitively as a teenager and entered NASCAR's national touring ranks in 2010, making his first national series start in 2012 as a development driver for Joe Gibbs Racing; his breakthrough came the following year piloting Kyle Busch Motorsports's No. 54 truck to victory at Martinsville Speedway, a track where, fittingly, he later honored Wendell Scott directly by running his own truck under Scott's old No. 34 in a tribute victory at the same venue in 2014. He moved through Ford's and then Toyota's driver development programs across the Xfinity and Truck Series before earning his first full-time Cup Series ride in 2018 with Richard Petty Motorsports, driving the team's historic No. 43 car and finishing runner-up in that year's Daytona 500, the best finish ever recorded by a full-time rookie in the race's history; he received public support ahead of that race from Hall of Fame baseball player Hank Aaron and Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton. After joining the newly formed 23XI Racing in 2021, co-owned by basketball legend Michael Jordan and veteran driver Denny Hamlin, Wallace won his historic first Cup race at Talladega that October, breaking down in tears afterward and dedicating the win directly to, in his own words, every kid out there who wants the opportunity to achieve whatever they're aiming for; he went on to win a second Cup race at Kansas in 2022 and a third, his first prestigious 'crown jewel' victory, at the 2025 Brickyard 400 in Indianapolis. As NASCAR's only full-time Black driver across its three national touring series for the entirety of his career, Wallace has remained an outspoken advocate for the sport's broader diversity and inclusion efforts, continuing to compete for 23XI Racing while building a family with his wife Amanda, who in 2024 gave birth to the couple's first child.

Sources

1. NASCAR official driver page; Bubba Wallace official website; NBC News; CNN; NBC Sports; FOX Sports