Darrell Wallace Jr. embodies need for speed, steady progress in NASCAR
Think in contrasts when it comes to NASCAR driver Darrell Wallace Jr.
Wallace deals in speed for a living and is into clouds. Not the smoke clouds whipped up by a Pit Road peel-out, but the ones that float overhead. He says if you see clouds, you'll see him looking up, trying to figure out the best photography angle.
Wallace also shoots time-lapse video. He has done short videos that feature a patient chronicling of things that happen slowly.
Yet, impatience on the track cost him this season, and there's an impatience surrounding his progress up the NASCAR ranks.
That leads to this last contrast: Wallace fits the stereotypical profile of a NASCAR driver, with his North Carolina upbringing, affinity for Dale Earnhardts living and dead, an early talent behind the wheel, even the nickname "Bubba" . . . except that he's also the first black driver to win a race in one of NASCAR's main series in 50 years.
NASCAR's present runs Sunday, when a champion will be crowned at the season-ending race in Homestead. Jimmie Johnson, winner of five consecutive series titles from 2006 to 2010, needs only to finish 23rd or better at Homestead-Miami Speedway to clinch his sixth series championship.
But Saturday's races - the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series and NASCAR's Nationwide Series - feature the sport's future. While some Sprint Cup series drivers dip into the trucks or Nationwide series, those circuits often function as a proving ground for NASCAR's Sprint Cup hopefuls. That group includes the 20-year-old Wallace, a graduate of NASCAR's Drive for Diversity program and truck series driver.
"I've been in barbershops in my hometown where people of color are always asking me when he's going to be in the [Sprint] Cup series?" said ESPN analyst Brad Daugherty, also the owner of a truck series team and a former NBA star.
Wallace's truck series win in the Kroger 200 at the Martinsville (Va.) Speedway last month clearly didn't hurt that prospect.
"That win definitely helped in the exposure level that's key to racing," Wallace said.
That's a reference to a fact that NASCAR's Drive for Diversity can do only so much about, even as it's the basic reason NASCAR desires driver diversity in an increasingly multicolored United States: money.
"At the end of the day, it's about the color of green," Daugherty said. "You or I can just pick up a basketball. Racing is cost-prohibitive. That's what Darrell is facing now."
Whatever the economic indicators say about the economy, NASCAR owners have said that for the past few years sponsorship money hasn't flowed as freely as it once did to Sprint Cup teams. Most of the Nationwide and truck series teams, never flush in the best of times, are NASCAR's version of the working poor.
Even in those series, sponsors like getting behind teams with drivers who have some name recognition. That makes it much more likely that photos will be taken of the car with the sponsor's name and the TV coverage will show the car.
After the driver's day is done, he or she probably would be interviewed about the race and inevitably would refer to the car by the sponsor's name, as modern drivers know to do. Even in regular conversation. Wallace, in discussing his photography with the Miami Herald, didn't speak generically of his camera but said, "Just doing stuff with my Canon 60D .. . I upgraded to a Canon 5D Mark III and started to do time-lapse . . ."
NASCAR
Darrell Wallace Jr. blends a newfound patience with the need for speed - and along the way hopes to attract more black fans to NASCAR.
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