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Bubba Wallace crushed after runner-up finish at Daytona 500: 'Like a gut punch'

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Bubba Wallace was devastatingly close, painfully close.

And he felt the agony of defeat immediately, finishing the Daytona 500 on Sunday as the runner-up for the second time in his NASCAR Cup Series career.

Wallace missed out on what could have been his second consecutive superspeedway victory by just 0.036 seconds behind Cup rookie Austin Cindric in the 2022 season opener. It was the third-smallest margin of victory in Daytona 500 history, but in the No. 23 23XI Racing Toyota’s driver’s eyes, it’s first or failure.

“Damn, I wanted to win that one,” said Wallace, who’s at the beginning of his fifth full-time Cup season and second with Michael Jordan and Denny Hamlin’s team.

After parking his car on pit road with Cindric and the No. 2 Team Penske Ford team celebrating in the background, Wallace climbed halfway out of his car and sat in the opening of the driver’s seat window, taking a moment to himself. His heartbroken emotions seemed to be building inside, as he held back welling tears in his eyes.

Speaking to the media afterward, he reiterated his dejected feelings.

“Going down the back, [I was like], ‘Alright, pal, it can either end really bad or end really good,” Wallace said he thought to himself on the last lap in overtime. “‘This could hurt or the victory could be sweet.’ I think I’d rather get wrecked out than finish second.”

He was running among the top-5 drivers during that final trip around the 2.5-mile track. By the time he exited Turn 4 for a one last push to the finish line, he was up to third.

“We were gonna turn and burn right there,” Wallace’s crew chief, Bootie Barker, said about the No. 23 team’s approach to the two-lap shootout to close the race. “All out, take ‘em out, whatever you’ve gotta do.”

And when Team Penske’s Ryan Blaney went to make a move on his teammate Cindric, who was leading the race, Wallace had an opportunity on the inside of the track. Cindric moved to the outside to throw a block on Blaney, but with an open lane on the inside, Wallace just couldn’t get there.

“I felt like I had a really good chance to lose it, and to lose it means you’ve got a shot to win it,” Cindric said.

“You talk about Brad [Keselowski], Ryan, Bubba — a lot of the guys that I was having to fend off there at the end of the race are guys that have been in the sport for a while and have paid their dues and put themselves in position every time at these types of races.”

And this is the second time Wallace has been in this specific situation, finishing second to Austin Dillon in the 2018 Daytona 500. But he said this one came with “a total different emotion.”

Wallace was a Cup rookie four years ago and said he “didn’t know what [he] was doing” back then running up toward the front. This time around, he “really thought we had it.”

“I didn’t have a fighting chance in the first time in 2018,” Wallace said. “This one, being that close, it’s just like a gut punch. So going from all the confidence in the world to literally having it ripped out from underneath you is a really [expletive] feeling.”

Wallace being in contention at the end was far from a surprise. He now has four top-5 finishes at Daytona and was again the runner-up in August in 400-mile regular-season finale before earning his first career Cup victory at Talladega Superspeedway in October.

“He definitely has a knack for [superspeedway races],” Barker said, noting it’s instinctual and not something you can teach racers. “You gotta have good stuff, but Bubba’s exceptional at these places.”

23XI Racing director of competition Mike Wheeler praised Wallace’s confidence and aggressiveness in the final laps not taking his foot off the gas. But second place, even one by 0.036 seconds, still isn’t a win, and it stings, Barker said.

Wallace caught his first glimpse of the finish on the big screen while on pit road and couldn’t help but look as it replayed.

“Ooooh, I don’t want to see that,” he said. “That sucks! God! That sucks!”

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