By Jerry Jordan, Editor
Following Bubba Wallace’s angry display of douseing Alex Bowman with a sports drink, Sunday night, as he was receiving medical care for heat-related issues from the ROVAL event at Charlotte Motor Speedway, NASCAR Chief Racing Development Officer, Steve O’Donnell, said the matter is not yet resolved.
“I would say I will be having a conversation with Bubba Wallace. I think that was really not classy whatsoever,” O’Donnell, said during his weekly call-in on satellite radio. “I understand that drivers have issues with each other during a race, we totally get that, but when a driver is on the ground being attended to by medical personnel, you need to be smarter than that. We’ll have that conversation with Bubba and see how that goes and obviously prior to Dover.”
The incident occurred after Wallace exited his car on pit road and made a bee-line for Bowman following the race. Wallace never said a word as he was flanked by two NASCAR media members and his PR rep, walking straight to Bowman and confronting him as he sat on the ground receiving medical care. He leaned down, said something which could not be heard and then threw his sports drink in Bowman’s face.
He later spoke with a NASCAR.com reporter, who followed Wallace back to the garage, saying he felt like Bowman was faking being overheated.
“He don’t like to race. He just runs over everybody,” Wallace told NASCAR.com. “He gets to Lap 1 and he runs over me and the 3 (Austin Dillon) into the back chicane. We’re back there in the trunk, man. Just take it easy for a lap. He had a fast car and he just run over us. Shoot us through the chicane and then we get a penalty for it. Every time he gets to me, he just runs over me.
“Smooth move of playing the sick card so I couldn’t bust him in his mouth.”
As for Bowman, he admitted to spinning Wallace on the track after being repeatedly shown the middle finger. He said the Lap1 incident was not intentional but when he spun Wallace later in the day he was standing up for himself.
“It is what it is in my book, just don’t flip me off,” Bowman said. “If you do it once, I get it, I ran into to you on the first lap. That’s on me, I messed up. But don’t do it for three laps in a row every single straightaway.”
Bowman said he wasn’t sure what to expect from any potential meeting with NASCAR.
“I don’t know, I have never been in that situation before so I don’t know how to answer that,” he said. “We raced side-by-side later in the race and didn’t run into each other then.”