NASCAR released a photo of the door pull thought to be a noose in the garage that Bubba Wallace used at Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama.
Steve Phelps, the president of NASCAR, said “the noose was real” on Thursday, two days after the FBI and Justice Department concluded that a “garage door pull rope fashioned like a noose” had been in the same garage since at least October and did not present a hate crime.
Phelps said the racing company conducted a full search of all of the 29 tracks where it races. Among the more than 1,800 garages reviewed, only 11 of the door pulls were tied in a knot. Only one was tied in a noose.
It appears to have been an unfortunate coincidence that Wallace, NASCAR’s only full-time black driver, was assigned to the garage with the noose.
Investigators were unable to determine who tied it, but NASCAR promised the company would undergo sensitivity training as a result of the incident.
“I want to say how [relieved] I am 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,” Wallace said in a statement.
Wallace, 26, had called for the racing giant to prohibit the display of Confederate flags at NASCAR events, and a ban was put in place earlier this month.
In a show of unity Monday, a crowd of drivers pushed Wallace and his car to the front of the Talladega track.
