NASCAR: Bubba Wallace can now compete for a championship

Bubba Wallace didn’t qualify for the 2022 NASCAR Cup Series playoffs, but a recent change will allow him to compete for a championship.

23XI Racing’s Bubba Wallace isn’t one of the 16 drivers eligible to win the 2022 NASCAR Cup Series championship, but after a recent strategic announcement by his race team, he can still compete for a title.

The driver of the #23 Toyota finished the regular season in 20th place in the point standings without a victory, eliminating him from qualifying for the playoffs. The #23 team finished in 21st in the owner standings.

But things are a little bit more complicated for the Denny Hamlin and Michael Jordan-owned team’s #45 Toyota.

Kurt Busch was the full-time driver of that car before a qualifying crash at Pocono Raceway in July sidelined him with concussion-like symptoms.

Busch was set to be one of the 16 playoff drivers, as he won the race at Kansas Speedway back in mid-May and was granted a playoff waiver to ensure that his missed starts wouldn’t count against his playoff eligibility. There could no longer be more than 16 different race winners, and he was locked into the top 30 in the point standings.

But last week, he opted to withdraw his waiver request, freeing up a playoff spot that ultimately went to Team Penske’s Ryan Blaney. Blaney finished the regular season highest among the non-winners in the point standings, so he is set to join the other 15 winners in the upcoming four-round, 10-race playoffs.

However, the #45 team, not Blaney’s #12 team, is set to compete in the owner playoffs.

In the six races that have been contested since Busch’s injury, Ty Gibbs has served as his replacement. Gibbs competes full-time for Joe Gibbs Racing in the Xfinity Series and is thus ineligible for Cup Series points. What Gibbs is eligible to do, however, is score points for the #45 team.

The #45 team’s points — and Busch’s win at Kansas Speedway back in May — aren’t specifically tied to Busch, meaning that the #45 team is one of the 16 teams qualified for the owner playoffs.

With Wallace being more experienced than Gibbs and having no chance to win his own championship, or win the owner championship for #23 team, the team opted to move him to the #45 Toyota for the playoffs in an attempt to bolster the #45 team’s owner title chances.

So Wallace can technically still compete for a championship that wouldn’t actually be his.

Of course, this doesn’t make Wallace a playoff driver, the same way it wouldn’t make Gibbs a playoff driver had he continued to pilot the #45 Toyota throughout the postseason.

But it should provide him with valuable playoff experience in terms of how to deal with the cut line and other postseason scenarios in whichever rounds he ends up being a part of, something he wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise.

The playoffs are scheduled to begin this Sunday, September 4 with the Cook Out Southern 500, which is set to be broadcast live on USA Network from Darlington Raceway beginning at 6:00 p.m. ET. Begin a free trial of FuboTV today!