NASCAR: Bubba Wallace responds: ‘It’s a straight-up noose’

NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace spoke to Don Lemon on CNN Tonight on Tuesday evening to discuss the FBI’s investigation of what was believed to be a noose in his team’s garage stall.

On Sunday evening, after NASCAR had postponed the Cup Series race at Talladega Superspeedway to Monday afternoon due to rain, the sport released a statement saying that a noose had been found in the garage stall of the #43 Richard Petty Motorsports team.

The driver of the #43 Chevrolet, Bubba Wallace, is the lone African-American Cup Series driver, and he has been the subject of many recent discussions within the sport about equality and racial tensions, given what has transpired in the United States over the last month or so.

The FBI investigated the incident and determined that it was all based on a misunderstanding and that the rope in question was a garage pull rope that had been fashioned like a noose and had been there since the race at the same venue back in October.

Nobody could have known that it would be the #43 team occupying that particular stall this time around, especially given the fact that Monday’s race had initially been scheduled to take place on Sunday, April 26 but had to be pushed back by nearly two months due to the coronavirus pandemic.

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On Tuesday evening, Wallace spoke with Don Lemon on CNN Tonight to address the issue and how it was handled.

“I don’t know what time it was, about 5:30-6:00 Sunday evening, after the race has been called, garages are closed,” he said. “My crew was on a plane back to North Carolina. I was about to go out to dinner with a couple of fellow competitors. We were talking about what time we were going to leave, where we were going, and I’m in my motorhome. I get a phone call from President Steve Phelps, and it’s a phone call that I’ll never forget.

“It’s one of those phone calls where you can automatically tell within the first couple seconds that something is wrong. It immediately made me think, ‘What did I do? What am I getting suspended for? What did I say wrong in an interview?”, whatever it was. And so I’m thinking all the bad things, whatever it could have been that I had done, whatever I said. So he’s like, ‘we need to talk in person’. So he walks down to the motorhome, opens up the door, and the look that he had on his face alerted me in a way that I’ll never forget as well, and I’m still thinking like ‘Okay, what did I do? Let me know.'”

That’s when Phelps told him that the object resembling a noose had been found in his team’s garage stall.

“The conversation that I had with Steve Phelps was, I would say, and I’m speaking for him, I would probably say one of the hardest things if not the hardest thing he’s ever had to tell somebody,” Wallace stated. “Tears rolling down his face, choked up on every word that he was trying to say that the evidence that he had brought to me that a ‘hate crime was committed’. And I immediately thought my family was in danger. And so I was about ready to call my mom and dad and to make sure everybody was okay, but it was in the garage stall where our car was at, and so I was kind of like taken aback and not really comprehending everything.”

Wallace told Lemon that he never actually saw the rope in question, as he was not in the garage area.

“I had never seen the noose. I never reported it. Like I said, I was going to dinner.”

But he added that he had seen photo evidence of it, and he maintains that it was very much a “straight-up noose”, and not just a garage pull.

“The image that I have and that I have seen of what was hanging in my garage is not a garage pull. I’ve been racing all my life, we’ve raced out of hundreds of garages that ever had garage pulls like that,” he stated. “So people that want to call it a garage pull and put out old videos and photos of knots as their evidence, go ahead. But from the evidence that we have, that I have, it’s a straight-up noose. The FBI has stated it was a noose, over and over again. NASCAR leadership has stated that it was a noose. I can confirm that. I actually got evidence of what was hanging in my garage over my car around my pit crew guys to confirm that it was a noose. Never seen anything like it.”

The FBI did refer to the object as a noose, although NASCAR’s statement simply stated that it was a “garage door pull rope fashioned like a noose”. Phelps used the word “noose” in his separate teleconference with the media on Tuesday evening.

“It was a noose. It was a noose, that was, whether tied in 2019 or whatever, it was a noose,” Wallace reiterated. “So it wasn’t directed at me, but somebody tied a noose, that’s what I am saying. It was — it is — a noose.”

During the interview, Lemon stated multiple times that NASCAR probably jumped the gun, and Wallace didn’t disagree. He said that he had even asked his crew chief, Jerry Baxter, if maybe they, too, were jumping the gun.

“I talked to my crew chief about it. I wanted to make sure we weren’t jumping the gun. And I said, ‘this isn’t a knot?’, and he’s like ‘Bubba, this isn’t something that can be done within a second of just tying a knot and being on the way. This is something that took time.'”

At the end of the day, we can all be grateful that there was no hate crime committed against Bubba Wallace or anybody within the NASCAR community, and we can be thankful that nobody within the NASCAR community would commit such a heinous act.

As far as NASCAR and Wallace jumping the gun, there is still a case to be made for that given their early and pre-investigation allegations of a “hate crime”, one which ended up not existing, but the process played out like it was supposed to with the FBI and they were able to get to the bottom of it.

And now Wallace has had the chance to get his side of the story out in the open as well.