The Wide World of Dirt

A Twitter user took Easter weekend to drop a troubling thread on the timeline comparing Bubba Wallace and Daniel Suárez throughout their collective careers.

On the surface, one could argue this is just a simple comparison between two young drivers getting a new lease on life with their new teams.

To me, that’s clearly not what it is.

To go through the histories of the two drivers and just make broad conclusions on a driver based on surface-level statistics is just plain lazy.

Opportunities aren’t created equally in motorsports, particularly in NASCAR where sponsor backing primarily determines what rides are available to you.

Opportunities are especially not created equally for anyone of color, which is why NASCAR developed the Drive for Diversity program over the past two decades.

Wallace and Suárez, both alums of the Drive for Diversity program, still haven’t had the same level of opportunities as one another.

Wallace performed super well in KBM equipment in the Truck Series, and after two top-10 points finishes, he asked to move up to the Xfinity Series.

Wallace already got some shots in JGR equipment from 2012-14 in the Xfinity Series, and he performed well. He kept the car clean and got the car a good finish almost every time he got in the car.

While his performance on the track and his personality off the track should have attracted sponsorship, JGR offered him another year in the truck series. Wallace felt compelled to move up and make a change.

He signed Roush Fenway Racing to pilot the #6 car in 2015 and beyond as a member of the Ford driver development program.

Some context on RFR: their Xfinity Series team fielded three cars in 2014. All three finished top-10 in points, but they combined for one win between them.

On top of that, the team wasn’t regularly competitive with a Cup driver-heavy NXS field at the time. They would plug around and finish between 4th and 17th.

Their lone win of 2014 came at Mid-Ohio where Chris Buescher coasted to victory on fuel mileage. He didn’t lead the most laps. He was just in the right place and made the most of his opportunity.

Roush thought putting an aggressive young driver in their car would pay dividends, and it nearly did halfway through their first season together.

Wallace scored the pole at Dover and led late in the race before teammate Buescher drove through him, flattening the #6 car’s tire.

Bubba finished 17th, three laps down. It would be the closest he would come to victory lane in his rookie season, but he showed flashes of brilliance.

He ended the year 7th in points while Buescher stole the title from defending champion Chase Elliott. Teammate Ryan Reed won the season opener at Daytona, but it turned out to be his only top-10 of the season, finishing 10th in the final standings.

Meanwhile, Suárez moved into the seat Wallace wanted to occupy at JGR after a promising K&N and Peak Mexico series career. It helped he brought sponsorship from Arris as well.

Daniel proved to be a solid driver, scoring 18 top-10s in 33 races on his way to a top-5 points finish. Much like Wallace, he didn’t have many opportunities to compete given the abundance of Cup drivers in the field every week.

Suárez, with a better stat line and points finish, won Rookie of the Year over Wallace, but it’s important to remember JGR’s NXS program was leaps and bounds ahead of RFR’s.

More turnover occurred at Roush over the offseason as Buescher moved to the Cup Series while Reed and Wallace held down the fort in Xfinity. Over at Gibbs, Suárez got paired with 2015 truck series champion Erik Jones who looked to be a frontrunner from day one.

Wallace’s season never really gained any traction. One good run would be cancelled out by a string of bad runs. It became clear that Roush’s Xfinity program (much like their Cup program) lacked direction, and its drivers suffered.

His Roush teammate Ryan Reed didn’t score a top-10 until the 15th race of the season at Daytona, and had it not been for a top-heavy Xfinity field, he might’ve missed the inaugural Xfinity Playoff field.

Luckily for Roush, both of their drivers performed well enough to make the Playoffs, limping into the bottom of the grid of 12 drivers.

JGR put up results early, with Jones winning 2 of the first 10 races and finishing well in others. He looked like the early favorite for the title in spite of his mild inconsistencies.

Daniel flew under the radar, putting together strong runs and finishing races, only finishing outside the top 10 twice in the first 12 races. He even came close to victory at Fontana, passing Kyle Busch on the final lap before running out of fuel on the backstretch.

Suárez got another crack at Busch at its sister track in Michigan where the Monterrey native chased Kyle down in the closing stages of the race, passing him coming to the white flag and holding him off for the final circuit on the way to his first victory in the sport.

The two JGR cars surged ahead toward the Playoffs, with Jones collecting another win at Iowa and Suárez continuing his overwhelming consistency.

Daniel and Bubba were on opposing paths: one with a team on the rise and consistent funding while the other languished in declining equipment and facing sponsor troubles.

The Playoffs further exposed the gap between the two teams as Suárez dominated the second race of the first round at Dover on his way to his second victory of the season.

He followed that performance up with no finishes worse than 5th in the last six races, punching his ticket to Homestead for a chance at the championship.

Bubba’s team lacked consistency throughout the playoffs as they had all season, but they squeezed through the first round of the Playoffs to have a chance to race their way into Homestead where Wallace had won two years before in the truck series.

Their second round went poorly to say the least. A crash at Kansas and a mediocre finish at Charlotte left Bubba in a must-win situation heading into the cutoff race at Phoenix.

Fighting some personal turmoil during the race, Bubba fought through the field all night, and at times, he was the fastest car in the desert. Unfortunately, Bubba’s good run came to a screeching halt after contact with fellow Playoff driver Blake Koch.

His season was over, a steaming Leidos heap sitting crumpled near the entrance to turn 1.

Daniel faced off with Jones, veteran Elliott Sadler, and JRM newcomer Justin Allgaier for the Xfinity Series crown in Miami the next week, and the second-year driver didn’t disappoint.

Suárez went out there and dominated the event, leading 133 of 200 laps, and after a late-race caution brought most of the lead-lap cars into the pits, Suárez made the winning move to the inside of Sadler on the restart and claimed the championship.

Wallace could only play spectator in 11th. Watching a driver take the car he should’ve had to a title had to have been utterly agonizing. Knowing he didn’t have dedicated sponsors for next year didn’t make it hurt any less.

Suárez was supposed to defend his title in 2017, but the unexpected retirement of Cup Series veteran Carl Edwards thrust the reigning NXS champion into the Cup Series about a month before the season started.

Wallace’s season was much more complicated.

Bubba competed in the first 12 races of the 2017 season, and he looked to be turning a corner. He finished 6th in five straight races and was running 4th in points after Pocono.

That’s when the third-year driver was let go by Roush due to a lack of sponsorship. His entire team disbanded, and he was left without a ride for the rest of 2017.

That is until Aric Almirola needed a backup driver to pilot Richard Petty’s #43 car after he broke his back in a crash at Kansas the week before. With Ford Performance knowing Wallace needed an opportunity, they put him in the car in Almirola’s absence.

By all accounts, Bubba performed well. His debut at Pocono would’ve been more fruitful had a few youthful errors on his part not been committed.

HIs best performance came at Kentucky where he finished 11th, gaining several positions on the race’s final restart. Petty clearly saw something in the young driver, and he kept that in mind as Almirola would soon announce that he would join SHR in 2018.

As for their Cup careers, I don’t feel the need to recap that so much because the opportunity disparity between Daniel and Bubba has been pretty wide for the most part.

RPM is a mediocre team on its best days, and Bubba definitely experienced some growing pains driving for them over the past three seasons.

The team shared some fond moments: a runner-up finish in the 2018 Daytona 500, racing into the All-Star Race in 2019 (coincidentally, he caused Daniel to spin to win the stage), a 3rd-place at Indy in 2019, and of course, the entire spring Talladega race in 2020.

Until 2020, Wallace and RPM struggled for sponsorship dollars. At times, there were rumors they’d relegate themselves to a part-time team, but they never came to fruition.

Wallace showed he had what it takes to race well in lower-tier equipment, and his amount of sponsorship dollars and his personality attracted Michael Jordan to the sport to start his own race team with Denny Hamlin and put Bubba in the seat.

Suárez’s career narrative has been filled with criticism that he’s underperformed in great Cup Series equipment and squandered his chances and reputation.

That narrative is untrue.

While their points finishes would give you the impression Suárez’s JGR teammates had great seasons, Matt Kenseth had a decent Playoff run that culminated in a win at Phoenix that bolstered him to a 7th-place points finish.

Kenseth was an 8th-15th place car during the regular season, but he finished the year with only one finish worse than 14th in the final 10 races.

Hamlin’s 6th-place points finish was pretty accurate to the season he had. He won a couple of races, and after a run-in with Chase Elliott, his chances at a championship were crushed at Phoenix after a flat tire sent his car into the wall.

Kyle Busch was the second-best driver all season to eventual champion Martin Truex Jr, and he showed that even in the championship race. He came within striking distance, but he could never finish the job.

With Kenseth moving into semi-retirement, Erik Jones took over the #20 car after a decent rookie season as the second Furniture Row Racing car.

Jones wasn’t much better than Suárez in their rookie year, and he wasn’t particularly great in his sophomore season. Jones’ only win was at Daytona and only due to attrition.

He got bounced in the first round of the Playoffs because he was underwhelming and underdeveloped. His equipment wasn’t up to par either.

Hamlin struggled all season, and he found himself out of the Playoffs after the first round as well. He failed to win a race for the first time in his career and never came close really.

Busch was phenomenal all season, but even after an eight-win campaign, JGR failed him in the championship race where they struggled to keep touch with the leaders, finishing 4th in the final points standings.

Daniel was unceremoniously cut from the team in favor of Truex, and he hopped into SHR’s #14 car for 2019, only inking the deal a month before the start of the season.

Though all of SHR’s drivers reached the Round of 8 in 2018, the introduction of the Mustang clearly slowed the team down as only SHR stalwart Kevin Harvick won a race.

Even then, it took Harvick until the 20th race of the season to find victory lane, and he wasn’t a consistent competitor throughout the season. He was fast, but he didn’t have winning speed, which was clearly an organizational problem.

Both Clint Bowyer and Aric Almirola struggled to be relevant and limped into the Playoffs while Suárez surged ahead, falling four points short of Ryan Newman for the final spot.

Harvick made it to the final round at Homestead where he finished 3rd, but he was an anomaly on a team that underperformed as a whole.

Daniel led more laps than Bowyer than the veteran, and while he failed to make the Playoffs, it seemed that their performances were similar throughout the season except that Bowyer junked his car three more times than his younger teammate.

Bowyer somehow finished 9th on the season after a mediocre season while Almirola sat in 14th, a pretty accurate placement for him in 2019.

Instead of moving on from the two veterans who might be losing their skill (especially when Bowyer lacked significant sponsor dollars), Suárez was the odd man out going into 2020 as SHR Xfinity driver Cole Custer moved up to Cup.

The less said about 2020 for Daniel the better, but it was definitely the first time since their careers intersected that Daniel had a worse ride than Bubba.

Now, seven races into the 2021 season, both teams have one top-10 between them.

Daniel and Bubba have both shown flashes of brilliance already this season, but people are clearly only comparing them because they’re biased against Wallace.

A lot of the people that like these tweets about Suárez outperforming Wallace also like Brett Moffitt’s tweet this offseason, criticizing Suárez’s optimism about his new team.

If you’ve made it to the end of this article, you can clearly see that both drivers are clearly better than your average pay driver (i.e. Brandon Jones, Paul Menard, things of that nature.)

They’ve more than proven their worth in this sport on their own merits, and at times, they’ve been better than veterans who are supposedly in their primes.

To reduce their abilities and their current opportunities to their ethnicities is purely racism.

They have both earned the opportunities they currently have, and they have the sponsorship backing to keep themselves around for a while.

And, if you believe that it has anything to do with what their race is, then you’re blatantly ignoring the facts I just laid out for you.

Suárez won an Xfinity title while driving his team’s second car and struggled being the fourth car on four-car teams in the Cup Series. He finds himself the focus of a team for the first time in his career, and he’s showing the talent he’s always had.

Wallace was a star in the truck series who had sponsorship problems routinely stunt his career. It blocked a move to JGR’s NXS team. It influenced a move to Roush where he had to be teammates with Ryan Reed.

It got him into the King’s car, but that wasn’t a great car either. He struggled with sponsorship there as well, and due to a number of grand circumstances, he finds himself in the best opportunity of his career as the focus of Michael Jordan’s team.

If you see people making an argument between these two, you know what they’re doing.

If you want to clown them, do it. But, please screenshot them. Don’t give trolls gas.