Is There An Anger Management Problem In NASCAR?

1. Has on-track anger gotten over the top?

If you watched NASCAR from the 2000s and on, the chances are good that you associate Tony Stewart with the words “anger management.”

Should Bubba Wallace and those involved in other incidents be fast-tracked to do the same? This year, for instance, we have seen William Byron, Ty Gibbs and Noah Gragson blatantly and intentionally wreck or swerve toward another car on pit road, unnecessarily either causing an incident or injuring other crew members. None of those drivers, by the way, was suspended, just in case you want Wallace to sit out. The fact is this: If drivers’ idea of taking out aggression is to wreck another car at a high rate of speed, there’s a major issue.

Nobody other than Wallace himself knows what he was thinking when he hooked into Kyle Larson on Sunday. What we do know is that Sunday was not the first knee-jerk reaction by Wallace. There was the water thrown in the face of Alex Bowman.  There was also the NSFW iRacing rage quit. 

Being the sport’s only black driver and in the age of social media, I am not going to dispute that Wallace is under pressure to perform. He’s probably not the only driver in the garage who has others in lower divisions thinking, “man, I am so much more talented than driver XXX, but I don’t get the support he does.”

He’s under pressure and held to a standard that’ll never be met. I fully get that.

But people go to work every day in jobs that have stress involved, and in most cases, you don’t see them try to physically provoke someone or wreck into another vehicle.

It may be debatable what punishment Wallace should receive. But regardless, the way forward should be anger management in the offseason for he and others when similar on-track incidents happen. It’s best for Wallace, the sport and the drivers on the track around him.

2. Did Bubba Wallace just undo the past four months?

Before Sunday, it was a safe bet to assume that Wallace took a step forward in the second half of 2022. He had a win at Kansas Speedway, nearly won Michigan International Speedway and showed other gains, regularly running in or near the top 10. By all accounts, it was a performance that in most years, would have gotten him to the playoffs had the results not been so abysmal in the first half of the season.

Then came Sunday, when Wallace, who added to the strong second half and got a stage win, tarnished all of it by just not hooking his car into Larson’s,…