One of the most widely found and common surnames on American soil is perhaps Wallace. For a majority of individuals, this surname may not ring a bell, but not for avid NASCAR fans. The surname ‘Wallace’ has been an indispensable part of stock car racing, and that has played a decisive factor in shaping the sport and taking it to its glory.

The success of the Wallace brothers is not restricted to just personal gains and adding numerous feathers to the name, but rather, in their selfless devotion to the sport as a whole. There can be no denying the fact that the elder Wallace brothers have been flagbearers in providing a newer dimension to the sport. As a result, the youngest of the three Kenny Wallace seemed to be all praises for his elder siblings in his conversation with Jeff Burton.

Wallace laments being unable to surpass the reputation of his elder siblings

While Kenny Wallace might elude an eccentric aura from his personality, with a smile that never diminishes, his two brothers Mike and Rusty Wallace are second to none when it comes to racing. Rusty Wallace, who has been inducted into the Hall of Fame was one of the rivals of the Intimidator, Dale Earnhardt. Following in the same footsteps were the younger brothers Mike and Kenny Wallace. The younger two may not have been on par with their eldest brother but they were still well-known faces in NASCAR’s arena.

Moreover, apart from being a chiseled driver, Rusty Wallace was an efficient mechanic, who understood the intricacies of the car inside out and did not shy away from passing it down to fellow drivers. This was evident in Kenny Wallace’s conversation with Jeff Burton where he asserted the commanding presence of Rusty Wallace during his tenure in Team Penske. Speaking on his brother’s dominance in the team’s garage, and wishing to imitate it, the former NASCAR driver asserted, “I felt like if I bucked the system, I wished I could have been a little bit more like my brother because he ran Penske Racing.”

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Listening to tales of Rusty Wallace, guest Jeff Burton did not fail to acknowledge how the elder siblings of Kenny Wallace were a source of inspiration to him during his racing tenure and how he wanted to follow the same suit as the Wallace brothers. Burton expressed, “And that’s Rusty, Mark those guys like they were my heroes because they knew what shocks were on the car they knew what springs were in the car when I looked up and recognized I had to beat them[…]

“When I looked at how they were conducting their business, they were in it. They were making decisions, they knew it was in the car, they knew how the bodies were hung, they were in it and that’s what you needed to do. In my opinion, at that time in our sport, that’s where the success was.”

Jeff Burton acknowledges Kenny Wallace’s brother’s help in building his car after a poor qualifying

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While speaking to Wallace, Burton also reminisced how Rusty Wallace’s knowledge of the car, had helped Burton in a Dover race, after the driver suffered a poor qualifying. 

Burton continued on the same lines, “Your brother at Dover, I couldn’t qualify to save my a**, I was horrible qualifying and I was pitted next to him in the garage at Dover and I said, “Rusty, what I am doing wrong, why can’t I drive this thing?” And he said, “Let me see what you got?” We used to have our setups on a sheet of paper. He said, “You gonna qualify that?” I said that’s my intention, and he said that you are not gonna qualify and he set my car up in the floor in the garage at Dover.

“He said put this, wrote it all down, I gave it to my guys. We put it in, that’s how it used to be. I still qualified bad but those were the people that I was had this super respect for because Rusty was in there. I pitted next to him, I saw how he interacted with his team… That’s the guy I look up to and still look up to, because they are the ones, they just didn’t sit in the race car and mash the gas they had something to do with the vehicle itself.”

Jeff Burton’s words assert the fact, that it has been the sport that has always occupied a hallowed position for the Wallace brothers and how they have never shied away from providing their insights into the development of the sport.

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