Bubba Wallace has always been a polarizing figure in NASCAR, and few incidents involving him sparked more backlash than what happened with Hendrick Motorsports’ Kyle Larson in Las Vegas in 2022. It was one of the few times in recent memory that a driver actively weaponized his car to retaliate against a fellow driver, and Wallace became public enemy No. 1 in the community. Ask Wallace today, however, and he’d tell you he has no regrets.
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The 23XI Racing driver told NASCAR journalist Jeff Gluck in an interview that when he is constantly attacked, he will always respond. While he does not condone the way he handled the situation in Vegas, Wallace believes he was simply standing up for the people he represented that day.
“So people are still going to hate me for that. And that’s okay, because at the end of the day, I’m sticking up for my team and how we were disrespected in that moment. And I haven’t been disrespected since,” Wallace told Gluck, who posted the clip of the interview on X.
During Stage 2 of the Las Vegas race on October 17, 2022, Larson made an aggressive three-wide move, sliding up the track off Turn 4 and forcing Wallace into the outside wall. Wallace was not happy and intentionally hooked Larson’s right-rear quarter panel, which is a major no-no in the sport.
Both Wallace and Larson wrecked, while the incident also collected Christopher Bell and severely hurt his championship hopes. To make matters worse, Wallace then walked across the active track to confront Larson and aggressively shoved him multiple times, even as the HMS driver tried to de-escalate the situation.
Wallace faced heavy backlash in the aftermath. Boos followed him around the country, while social media was filled with criticism aimed at the No. 23 driver. He was viewed as the bully in the situation, with many fans upset that a driver who was not in the playoffs had affected the championship hopes of someone who was.
Wallace also pushed away an AMR safety worker who tried to separate the two drivers. NASCAR took this whole fiasco seriously and suspended Wallace for one race.
The 23XI star told the NASCAR community a day later that he should have dealt with the situation better. But going by his recent interview with Gluck, he didn’t let the hate from the community force him to think that he made a mistake.
In the past, Bubba has spoken about how some veterans in the garage would isolate him. They refused to work with him at superspeedways, often leaving him out of the drafting lines. As a newcomer to the sport, he also felt veterans raced him more aggressively to test him, which frustrated him. What Larson did to him in Vegas, pushing him into the wall, became the tipping point and the day Wallace decided to fight back.
“I know I’m kind of new to running up front, but I don’t lift,” he said to NBC after the Vegas incident with Larson, referencing the garage dynamic he was part of.
Wallace also told Gluck in the recent interview that he has not been “disrespected” since October 17, 2022. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t been involved in incidents, as those come aplenty for anyone racing at this level of NASCAR. But he was no longer seen as the outsider who could be pushed around. There is still a portion of the fanbase he cannot win over, but that hasn’t changed the way he approaches races.
Wallace still has an ‘eye for an eye’ mindset, and that has been seen multiple times over the years. In 2024, after Alex Bowman accidentally spun him during the Chicago Street Race in wet conditions, Wallace waited until the cool-down lap to slam his car into Bowman’s, who had won the race. He was fined $50,000 for the incident.
Then, earlier this year at Bowman Gray and Martinsville, he responded to Carson Hocevar’s on-track aggression by ramming his car into him, even causing a multi-car pileup in the latter.
For Wallace, the Vegas incident was about standing up for himself after feeling like he had been pushed around for too long. He has carried that mindset with him ever since, and while it has gotten him into trouble at times, one thing is clear: Wallace is not going to back down when he feels disrespected.