“You look at us coming in and being on the bubble - 21 points out with a ton of pressure and I think the pressure just switched," said Wallace after earning his first pole of the 2024 season. "We’re not here to mess around."
Wallace is a driver who wears his heart on his sleeve and rarely holds back his emotions. After the race at Daytona, he called his own performance "unacceptable" and seemed defeated. However, a text from 23xi Racing co-owner Michael Jordan this week helped him to change his mindset for the better. "The things you want more, cost me," it read. Wallace returned to the track with a new perspective and ready to leave it all out on the track.
"I showed up with a more open and calmer demeanor — more free and relaxing demeanor, but at the same time I don’t want to be messed with," continued Wallace. "So, it’s a fine balance you’ve got to walk. I appreciate the team. We unloaded — we did some changes to the car in the spring race, and it just wouldn’t give me the right read going into qualifying. So, I told Bootie (Barker, crew chief), ‘Hey, I need to be this to have a good qualifying run’ and here we are.
"Just everybody on the 23 car and everybody back at AirSpeed. Both cars just showing up with speed at Darlington for the Southern 500 is super cool. I’ve been close here I think once or twice in qualifying, so to finally pull it out, it’s like ‘Wow! We’ve got it!’ With all that being said, the elephant in the room -- tomorrow is a whole different day and I’m excited to see what tomorrow offers.”
A motivated Wallace showed solid pace in practice, but he was actually frustrated to not be topping the charts. He "set the expectations very high" as they set out to make up 21 points to Chris Buescher, who nearly won at Darlington. The pole is a much-needed confidence boost, but he's not the only driver he came out of the gate swinging. Carson Hocevar and Chase Briscoe, who face must-win situations, qualified second and third, respectively.
Wallace led the way in both rounds of qualifying, but the session was far from smooth sailing. He earned two Darlington Stripes in one lap during the first round, but still went quickest of all as he bounced off the outside wall.
“So today, I’ve determined that Darlington is probably one of the, if not the hardest places to qualify. Just the way you have to approach practice to the qualifying trim, it’s totally different. For example, Kansas the first couple laps in practice you’re damn near wide open. In qualifying, you’re wide open, so it’s close. Here you’re finessing and practicing and then hey, good luck. It all goes back to JR [Houston] and our analytics group. They do a really good job of feeding us the right information that translates to on-track performance.”
Anything can happen
But this 500-mile race at one of NASCAR's toughest tracks means anything can and will happen. The pole-sitter hasn't won the Southern 500 since Dale Earnhardt did it over three decades ago in 1990. Since then, the pole-sitter of the 400-miler in the spring has only won four times, with Joey Logano in 2022 being the most recent. That extra 100 miles is what truly makes this event a crown jewel.
"Yeah, anything can happen we’ve seen," said Wallace when talking about the playoff fight. "Look at last week, right. Anything can happen so we have to run our own race. It makes it a lot easier for us."
His outlook for this pivotal cut-off race is simple: "All I want is every single person (who is a) part of this team, including myself, is to go to bed tomorrow night saying: ‘We did whatever we could. We did all we could.’ And maybe it was good enough, maybe it wasn’t so that’s the lottery ticket we’ll find out tomorrow after the race.”
