‘The King’ Counting on Wallace To Continue Team’s Climb toward NASCAR’s Throne

Richard Petty knows people.

He met millions of fans during his heyday as the most successful stock car driver of all time, and as the driving force behind Richard Petty Motorsports, he is arguably the most recognizable figure in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series garage, still rocking the famous cowboy hat and dark wraparound shades after all these years. 

A lifelong resident of Randleman, North Carolina, Petty was a Randolph County commissioner for 16 years. He also made an unsuccessful run for North Carolina Secretary of State in 1996. Combined with his 60-year involvement in motorsports, these experiences molded Petty into a shrewd judge of character, a man who knows and understands what resonates with the public.

So when Petty needed to hire a new driver for his iconic No. 43 car this year, he called Bubba Wallace.

Christened Darrell Wallace Jr. but nicknamed ‘Bubba’ by his sister “the day I was born,” Wallace is one of a half-dozen young drivers NASCAR is counting on to provide star power into and throughout the 2020s. He’s been racing since age 9, his mind never wavering from the goal of a career in the Cup Series. 

Now 24, Wallace is the first African-American driver to compete full-time in the Cup Series in nearly 50 years – since 1971, when Wendell Scott was starting to wind down his trail-blazing career. That happened to be one of the most dominating seasons of Petty’s driving career, a year in which he won 21 races on the way to the third of his record seven NASCAR Cup Series titles. 

Truth be told, Petty has never experienced the same level of success as a team owner than he did as a driver, when he claimed a NASCAR-record 200 race wins in Cup and Grand National Series competition. Petty Enterprises, the organization founded by Richard’s father, Lee Petty, won just three races following Richard’s retirement at the end of the 1992 season; Petty joined forces with Evernham Motorsports in 2009, and Richard Petty Motorsports has captured five Cup Series wins over the last nine years, most recently when Aric Almirola triumphed in the 2014 Coke Zero 400 at Daytona International Speedway.

Ironically, when Almirola sustained back injuries in a crash in the summer 2017 race at Daytona, the door opened for Wallace. He stepped into the No. 43 car for four races, improving his result every time out to post three top-20 finishes, topped by an 11th-place run at Kentucky Speedway.

Petty liked what he saw in the young driver in those four races, so when Almirola opted to join Stewart-Haas Racing for 2018, “The King” knew who to call. Now he and Wallace have teamed up to try and slay the modern-day giants of the sport – multi-car efforts from the likes of Stewart-Haas, Hendrick Motorsports, Joe Gibbs Racing and Team Penske. Wallace will be in Petty’s famous No. 43 in the Big Machine Vodka 400 at the Brickyard Powered by Florida Georgia Line on Sunday, Sept. 9 at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

“From our standpoint of where we’re at in racing right now, it was a no-brainer,” Petty said. “Everything was new for us this year - we have a new shop, a new alliance with Richard Childress Racing, a brand-new car with the Chevrolet Camaro ZL1, and finally, a brand-new driver. We were making a lot of different changes at RPM for 2018, and the trend now is younger drivers anyway. Once NASCAR kind of did a preview for us, we said, ‘Hey, this is the way we need to go.’”

The temporary call-up to Petty’s Cup team in mid-2017 couldn’t have come at a better time for Wallace. He was driving a Ford in the NASCAR Xfinity Series for Roush Fenway Racing; the results weren’t coming, and with RFR downsizing, it looked unlikely that he would have the budget required to complete the season. After the four-race Cup Series audition with RPM, Wallace made only one more Xfinity Series start and won at Michigan Speedway in his only Truck Series appearance of 2017.

When Petty called, Wallace was ready for the challenge. He guided the No. 43 Chevrolet to a second-place finish in the Daytona 500, dodging Almirola’s last-lap wreck to secure the best finish of his short Cup Series career. But with that superb result came added pressure.

Suddenly, everyone was asking, “When will Bubba win?” – an unrealistic expectation for any driver in a rebuilding team during a tough season to date for Chevrolet. Wallace’s best result since Daytona was an eighth-place run at Texas Motor Speedway.

“The Daytona 500 was pretty much a week and a half of great things that happened for us,” Wallace said. “You hope for weeks like that to happen, but there are usually some bumps in the road that you hit. I think we are a little bit behind from where we want to be. But with that, I don’t think we had an exact clue as to what to expect with everything that went on during the offseason. Team change, manufacturer change, alliance (to Childress, after several years of working with Roush Fenway and Ford) and everything that kind of goes together for a satellite team. We were starting over. We knew we would have some bad weekends, and unfortunately our bad weekends are running 25th.

“There is a lot that goes into being a successful team – obviously big budgets, and teams that can spend millions and millions of dollars are going to be the ones winning. We are spending thousands of dollars, but there is a difference between thousands and millions. But I am proud of the efforts that we continue to show and to improve on each and every weekend. We are kind of rewriting history and the books one race at a time.”

It’s an interesting pairing, Petty and Wallace, where NASCAR’s past meets NASCAR’s future. Petty still attends every race, but he is 81 years old and there are signs that he may finally be slowing down. Meanwhile, Wallace’s career is gaining speed. He’s already a fan favorite, a born joker whose upbeat personality is perfectly suited to the social media generation.

Petty doesn’t know much about Instagram or Twitter, but he does know what kind of driver the No. 43 team needs in NASCAR’s modern era. And he’s convinced Wallace is the right man for the job.

“We started off really good at Daytona and then leveled off,” Petty said.“We had a lot to learn as a team, and we had to learn Bubba, too. At the same time, Bubba had to learn us. The first half of this season was just one big learning session, and I think we’d all like to get a little better as we go along.

“We really concentrate on what we can control. It’s been a good back-and-forth. We know where we’ve been the last four, five years, and we’ve got to maintain at least that and then go forward from there. We’ve been running 15th to 20th, but we want to be able to run 10th to 15th now on a regular basis. You’ve got a chance then, from time to time, to finish in the first five or even win a race.”