Bubba Wallace on his growth at superspeedways: 'Things have just clicked'

The recent spike up the sportsbook charts is no fluke. Bubba Wallace’s rise to 11-1 odds for Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Talladega Superspeedway is just one acknowledgment of how his skill set at the sport’s largest ovals has developed. His team and fellow competitors recognize it, too.

“That’s a good question because it’s kind of happened recently,” says Joey Logano, a three-time Talladega winner. “I’d say he’s a fairly patient speedway racer, where he makes moves every now and again, but most of the time, he’s pretty patient on kind of letting the race come to him. He used to be a lot more aggressive, make moves, and a lot of times they didn’t work. They weren’t fully calculated and made him honestly fairly easy to beat.

“Now, it’s not quite like that anymore where he’s upped his game and kind of found his own niche of speedway racing that works for him, and he does a good job of surviving them. And that’s the other piece I see. He does a good job of getting to the end, which plays to that patient piece.”

Wallace found his way to an abbreviated end of the most recent Talladega event, securing his first NASCAR Cup Series win. He enters Sunday’s GEICO 500 (3 p.m. ET, FOX, MRN, SiriusXM) with a recent bounty of strong showings on his side at Talladega, Daytona International Speedway and the new hybrid-superspeedway at Atlanta Motor Speedway — all of which use the same rules configuration and where the aerodynamic draft is king.

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Wallace had shown glimmers of superspeedway talent earlier in his career, most notably as an emotional runner-up in his first Daytona 500 while racing for team owner Richard Petty. Since joining 23XI Racing at the start of last season, he’s led laps in each of the races at Daytona and Talladega, and his most recent finishes at those two tracks are second (2021 Daytona-2), first (2021 Talladega-2) and second (2022 Daytona-1).