NASCAR Notes: Rain delays Richmond truck race
A rain delay postponed the truck series race at Richmond Raceway on Friday night.
The race will now begin at noon on Saturday. Truck series ticket holders will be allowed into the parking lots at 10 a.m., with Cup Series ticket holders allowed in at 2 p.m.
Randy Hallman
Drivers discuss social media hate
It’s certainly not exclusive to motorsports, but racist hatefulness abounds on social media concerned with a particular NASCAR driver – Bubba Wallace.
Wallace, a Black man, is a three-time NASCAR Cup Series winner since joining the 23XI team in 2021. He is the target of a never-ending parade of racist trolls, even on Facebook sites created to be gathering sites for fans of the driver and of the team.
Racing news, family photos, lighthearted bits – it doesn’t matter. The trolls are always there.
Two major owners of the 23XI team are Michael Jordan, the UNC and NBA legend (23 was his familiar jersey number), and superstar driver Denny Hamlin, who races in the Toyota number 11 (that’s XI in Roman numerals, kids).
Wallace and Hamlin are at Richmond Raceway for Saturday evening’s Cook Out 400. We asked them about the social-media nastiness.
Here’s some of what they said.
Wallace:
How much do you pay attention to such posts?
“A lot less, really, over the last year. I have my own pages that I interact with, I was off social media for probably the first four months of this season, maybe longer”
What made you go back?
“You can only go through the… photos app so many times before you want to know what your friends are doing, So I got back on there, but I’m genuinely disconnected from my professional page, that’s for sure.”
Is it a pain?
“When you sit there and you read that stuff, and you tell yourself, ‘Has anybody ever climbed in a race car? ’ So the words really don’t matter – but that’s not gonna stop ‘em…. It is what it is.”
Hamlin:
What are your thoughts about the tone that is sometimes taken?
“If you’re famous that’s part of it.… once fans in general figured out that they had access to your cell phone just by sending you a tweet, that emboldened them…. And, to know that they don’t have to answer to your response because it’s not face to face, certainly makes people very – um – courageous, in certain aspects.
“I just think that that’s something that will always be part of our culture going forward. I don’t think it’s something that’s ever going to change. The platforms aren’t going to do anything about it because, again, it’s just more engagement, more users, and more advertisement.
“It’s just something that we have to do the best we can to filter ourselves through our own settings on our phone, and our own eyes off of our phone every now and then.”
