Wallace deserves his ban for breaking NASCAR’s cardinal rule

You don’t hook a guy in the right rear at speed. I don’t care if you’re Bubba Wallace, Dale Earnhardt or Junior Johnson. You. Just. Don’t. Do it.

NASCAR has suspended Wallace for one race for doing just that to Kyle Larson at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, and rightfully so. It is the first suspension of a Cup Series driver for an on-track incident in nearly seven years and only the second suspension of a driver across any of stock car racing’s three national series over the same time span.

It had to be done.

The suspension would have been plenty justified had the incident happened way out on its own in a vacuum, where the two dueling racers were nowhere near anyone else. But they weren’t. They were two non-playoff drivers banging doors in traffic and wound up taking out championship contender Christopher Bell.

The timeout would have been understandable even if Wallace had chosen to retaliate for being raced into the outside wall by Larson but had done so as they traveled down the frontstretch or backstretch, with a pop into the rear bumper, or even a shot to the left rear to send Larson spinning into the infield grass. But that’s not what he did. He went full Cole Trickle with a nosedive down the banking off the fourth turn as he chased Larson all the way to the edge of that infield grass and jacked up the right rear of the No. 5 Chevy with the left front of his No. 45 Toyota.

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Anyone who has ever watched even one lap of NASCAR racing knows that move will send the attacked car into a loop that is likely to send it into the outside retaining wall, driver’s side first.

“If he spun him to the infield, maybe it’s a little better, but right-rear hooking someone in the dogleg is not OK. I don’t know if everyone realizes how bad that could have been,” a rattled Joey Logano said Tuesday on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio a few hours before the suspension announcement. “That could have been the end of Kyle Larson’s career. That to me was what was on the line. Or his life. That is the worst spot to get right-rear hooked into a corner.

“[Larson] might have flush-hit that thing in the side and game over. There’s no room for that. You can’t do that. If it’s under caution and you’re banging doors … I don’t know that that’s OK, but at least you’re not putting someone’s life at risk. I don’t like using cars for a weapon. Just get out and fight him. That’s fine if that’s what you really want to do and that’s…