Bubba Wallace suffered an embarrassing incident at Richmond Raceway when his left front wheel fell off immediately after a pit stop. He pulled into the pit stall for fellow Toyota driver Chase Briscoe, whose Joe Gibbs Racing pit crew reattached the stray wheel and sent Wallace on his way. As the Beatles sang, “I get by with a little help from my friends.”
Wallace was going strong, having just won the second stage of the race and running in second place before pitting, according to Road & Track. He came in for four tires and fuel, but drove away before the tire changers had secured the nut back onto the wheel. Despite the team’s efforts to stop him, Wallace drove off, only for the wheel to quickly separate from the car.
“Pull in right there,” Wallace’s 23XI Racing pit crew radioed to him as he entered Briscoe’s pit stall, and he did as they instructed. The loose wheel caught up to Wallace, bounced off his car, and came to a stop. While the Joe Gibbs Racing crew did not perform a record-breaking pit stop in this case, they retrieved the wheel, jacked up the car, and put it back on, enabling Wallace to return to the race. This mistake cost valuable time, bumping Wallace back to 31st place, though his performance earlier in the race sealed him a spot in the Playoffs. Since the loose wheel never entered the track, there was no penalty for this.
What happened here?
Initial reports indicated that the jack man had lowered the car too early, before the tire changers had finished securing the wheel. However, former Jalop Bozi Tatarevic offers a different explanation, which is visible in the NASCAR footage but far from obvious without his sharp eye. When the tire changers removed the left front wheel, the nut flew out of the socket and landed on the ground behind them, out of view. This shouldn’t ever happen, as the specialized socket uses both an O-ring and magnets to hang onto the nut between jobs.
When the tire changers put the new wheel on, the nut wasn’t there. They noticed the missing nut immediately when they pulled the impact wrench away. They tried to attach it again, not realizing it was gone, but by then the jack was down and Wallace was already driving away. This looks more like a freak accident than a mistake on the part of the pit crew. The only failure appears to be the socket not hanging onto the wheel nut. Joe Gibbs Racing must have used a nut of their own to put Wallace’s wheel back on and send him back to the track.
