NASCAR CUP SERIES: DAYTONA 500

February 20, 2022

Bubba Wallace

Frontstretch Qutoes

An Interview with:

Q. Bubba Wallace finishes second in the Daytona 500. I saw you put your head down as you got out of the race car. So strong all night long. Talk me through the emotions?

BUBBA WALLACE: Yeah, first of all, that's pretty damn cool to win the 500 in I think the first attempt, maybe not. But full season for him, so congrats to Austin.

What could have been, right? Man, need to talk about some happy stuff here. Just dejected, but the thing that keeps me up is just the hard work that we put into our speedway stuff and the hard work from everybody at 23-11, proud of them, can't thank them enough.

I knew this was a big move last year for me to go out and be competitive, and we're showing that.

It's always the first race of the season and you're getting through everything, but when you come out of the gates like that, it's empowering, it's encouraging. So thanks, everybody, back at the shop, McDonald's, almost got them another one, back-to-back superspeedway wins. That would have been awesome, especially with it being the 500. But just short.

I thought our Toyota teammates did good work until they got picked off 1, 2, 3 throughout the race, so we just had to survive.

Great Speedweeks, though. We'll come home second. I'm going to be pissed off about this one for a while. I was happy on the first second place we got a couple years ago. This one sucks when you're that close, but all-in-all, happy for our team, happy for our partners, and on to California.