Bubba Waleys has never been afraid to stir things up in NASCAR, and he plans to paint his own race this weekend at Talladega Superspeedway, doing exactly that. The 23rd XI Driver Racing will run a car sponsored by the COVID-19 vaccine.
Wallace’s No. 23 Toyota will carry Kruger Health and Nuvaxovid, a protein-based COVID-19 vaccine, to Alabama this weekend. And as you might expect, the system got a lot of public attention as soon as it was revealed.
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Vaccine Car at Talladega
NASCAR’s Joseph Srigley shared the paint scheme on Wednesday.
“Kruger Health and Nuvaxovid (COVID-19 Vaccine, Adjuvanted) sponsor Bubba Wallace and the No. 23 Toyota Camry XSE this weekend at Talladega,” Srigley wrote.
Nuvaxovid is a non-mRNA vaccine, according to 1819 News. Wallace’s car has been running with a group of top sponsors throughout the season, including Columbia and Hardee’s, and the official NASCAR draft picture lists the car as the No. 23 Kruger Health Toyota.
Many of the spiders had jokes about the combination of covid-19 vaccine sponsorship, a ghost that skews conservative, and race in the Deep South. Others simply hoped that Wallachia would live only because of how people behaved.
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Wallace’s History of Talladega
Talladega was home to some of the most important moments of Wallace’s life. In October 2021, he won a rain-shortened race en route to his first Cup Series victory, becoming the first Black driver to win a Cup race since Wendell Scott in 1963.
Tracks are also the most difficult part of one’s career. In June 2020, a member of Wallace’s team reported a trap in his stall, and the driver and crew members pushed his car to the front of pit road in an appearance of support before the race.
The FBI later determined that Wallace was not the target of a hate crime, such as pulling the cable to the garage door that had been in place since the previous fall. But NASCAR noted that Wallace’s stable was one of the 11 only with a knotted drag rope tied into the trap, and Wallace and his team had “nothing to do about it.”
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Waleys, who was born in Mobile, Alabama, drew plenty of backlash from some NASCAR fans years later.
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