By: Cole Cusumano

It’s no secret the 2020 NASCAR Cup Series season has been an exhilarating thrill ride for Chevrolet teams; Bubba Wallace in the infamous No. 43 and Richard Petty Motorsports is no exception. The 26-year-old picked up his second top-10 of the year at Bristol Motor Speedway after what he called a “hard fought” battle.

Wallace had to overcome two pit road speeding penalties — an obstacle insurmountably difficult to come back from, especially at a half-mile track. He also admitted he’d overstepped his assessment in trying to adjust his Camaro early on, but his team was able to rebound throughout the day and things began to go their way as rubber continued to be laid down.

“I am excited about the speed we’ve been bringing to the track each week,” Wallace said. “We need to tweak some things to get us to the next level. We are knocking on the door.”

While only two top-10 finishes to show for throughout nine races, this is already more than the No. 43 team had in 2019. Not to mention, Wallace has consistently been a common name near the top dozen of the leaderboard, even picking up his first stage points since July of last year at Daytona International Speedway in the 500 kilometer event at Charlotte Motor Speedway in the previous race.

As for the adjustments that must be made to expose the diligent efforts of the Drive for Diversity product and his team, they are plentiful. They’ve seen everything from pit road miscues, parts failures and getting involved in wrecks that have plagued their performance.

For the most part, these are manageable flaws the team can work through, but until the results start to show, it could be a little while before Richard Petty Motorsports picks up its first victory since 2014.

“All-in-all, it was a good day at the Bristol Motor Speedway,” Wallace said. “It was fun there at the end. It was wild – that race had pretty much everything.We’re doing really good things. We will carry some momentum over – finally got a good finish after two bad ones. We got the bad juju off our back and we will go onto the Atlanta Motor Speedway!”

It may not be smooth sailing for the Alabama-native this week, as he hasn’t finished above 27th at the 1.5-mile oval. But if indeed that rain cloud has dissipated from above, Wallace and his crew would happily welcome it.

EMAIL COLE AT: colecusumano88@gmail.com

FOLLOW ON TWITTER: https://twitter.com/Cole_Cusumano_

The thoughts and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of PopularSpeed.com, its owners, management to other contributors. Any links contained in this article should not be considered and endorsement.