Freddie Kraft reacts to wild Bubba Wallace recovery from last to P6 at Iowa

One of the more underrated storylines from the Iowa Corn 350 was a hard charge to the front at the end of the race by Bubba Wallace. Wallace finished sixth after falling behind by two laps in the third stage.

He was able to make up ground by virtue of the fact that so many early cautions in the third stage kept just about everyone on the lead lap. He got the free pass to go from two laps down to one lap down. The rest was history.

“It was a race nobody fell out of,” Wallace’s spotter, Freddie Kraft, said on the Door Bumper Clear podcast. “For all the cautions there were, everybody finished the race I think. Like everybody was still out there.

“I looked at it, we lost a lap… well we lost two laps fixing the toe link. And I looked down and go, ‘Holy sh*t, we’re last.’ We were like 35th out of 37, something like that. ‘Damnit, everybody else is still out here.'”

For Bubba Wallace, that was hardly a problem. Wallace simply got to driving.

He made quick work of the back of the field after getting back on the lead lap, then it was just a matter of mowing down car after car in front of him in the NASCAR Cup Series tilt. Kraft knew there was some potential to catch back up, but not like it played out.

“I looked up one time and I was like, you kind of look ahead, see where you can get to,” Kraft said. “And that last run was like 60 laps maybe. I said, ‘I think we can get to 15th.’ I said, ‘We’re f coming. We can drive to 15th.’ And then we got to 15th and I said, ‘Holy sh*t, there’s still 30 to go. We can drive to 10th maybe.’ And then we get to 10th, I go, ‘We might get to top 5.'”

Bubba Wallace would get all the way up to sixth place, an excellent finish given the circumstances of the day. He also did it on a day when there wasn’t much tire fall-off, making passing extremely difficult.

It might have been the most impressive driving of the day. And Wallace was cool after the race.

“Bubba all day, Bubbba being Bubba he’s like, ‘If you just tighten this thing up we’re going to be really good,'” Kraft said. “So then of course he does that and he goes, ‘I told you motherf****** if you just tighten this thing up we’re going to be able to do this.’ But no, it was a phenomenal finish for us.”

There was also an additional benefit to the strong finish for Bubba Wallace. Kraft explained.

“Just piggyback what we did, we leapfrogged (Chris) Buescher, which if you’re not paying attention to the standings that’s a point,” Kraft said. “We jumped him for 10th in the regular season standings, which the 10th place guy gets a point in the playoffs. So it’s a big deal for us. I mean it looked effortless. The car was so good at the end of the race.”