NASCAR’s Bubba Wallace expressed his relief that he was not the victim of a hate crime after claiming the rope found in his car stall at Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama was a “straight-up noose.”
“It’s been an emotional few days,” Wallace said in a statement on Twitter Wednesday afternoon. “First off, I want to say how relieved I am that the investigation revealed that this wasn’t what we feared it was. I want to thank my team, NASCAR and the FBI for acting swiftly and treating this as a real threat. I think we’ll gladly take a little embarrassment over what the alternatives could have been.”
“Make no mistake, though some will try, this should not detract from the show of unity we had on Monday, and the progress we’ve made as a sport to be a more welcoming environment for all,” he added.
A day earlier, in an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon, Wallace insisted that the garage door pull rope was a noose, despite the FBI and Justice Department saying that they found no federal hate crime was committed after the item was discovered in his car stall earlier this week.
“I’ve been racing all of my life. We’ve raced out of hundreds of garages that never had garage pulls like that. So, people that want to call it a garage pull and put out all the videos and photos of knots as their evidence, go ahead. But from the evidence that we have, that I have, it’s a straight-up noose,” he said.
Wallace, NASCAR’s only black driver, “was not the target of a hate crime,” and the rope appearing like a noose had been hanging in the stall since last year, the FBI and the DOJ said in a statement Tuesday afternoon.
Amid nationwide protests demanding racial equality, Wallace urged NASCAR to ban the Confederate flag from races, which the league did, earlier this month.
