Bubba Wallace and William Byron were battling inside the top 10 when Alex Bowman in 6th ended the race for all three drivers on Lap 77 in Charlotte. While all three drivers made it to the medical center, it was Chase contenders Wallace and Byron who felt more of the consequences than Bowman in the No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet.

Bowman, who failed to make the Chase, had missed four races early in the season because of vertigo, was visibly upset. Not because it was his sixth DNF, but because he also took out two drivers competing in the Chase.

“I had run down there a lot and been really tight on exit. As soon as I touched the throttle, it snapped, and it really, it obviously caught me off guard, and I overcorrected and just did a s*** job and ruined some guys’ days,” Bowman told media, including Matt Weaver, after exiting the medical center. “I hate that for William and Bubba. It’s on me. 

“It should be better than that, but yeah, just not really sure why it snapped as bad as it did. Because we had run down there so much and been really tight on exit, but it should have been ahead of it better than that.”

It all went down when Wallace in the No. 23 23XI Racing Toyota was running side by side with the No. 48 HMS coming out of Turn 2 onto the backstretch. Bowman suddenly got loose and tried to overcorrect. Running the inside line, the No. 48’s overcorrection, as his car got loose, made the Chevy snap right, hard into Wallace, who was running the outside line.

Wallace, who had been running well before that and was even in contention for the race lead for a bit, was caught off guard and had nowhere to go as the nose of Bowman’s car slammed into the left side of the Toyota. While data on the impact is awaited, Bowman’s car went on to hit the outside wall after that contact. Several comments flooded social media that the impact would have been harder for Bowman had Wallace’s car not taken the first impact.

Meanwhile, Byron in the No. 24 HMS Chevy was running behind Wallace, and when he saw the contact ahead of him, he tried to go left to the inside line. His front right grazed against Bowman’s spinning car, and the cars scraped against each other while Byron continued forward, and the taping on his right side peeled off from the contact.

Byron then went straight into Wallace. This time the contact was to the left rear of Wallace’s No. 23 Toyota. Wallace, Byron, and Bowman all ended up in the run-off area as a caution fell. While the HMS drivers got out of their cars on their own, the 23XI driver was visibly shaken up and needed help getting out of his car. Once out, he managed to walk to the medical center himself.

Bowman was asked by the press if he could feel the issue building up or if he felt his car was about to get loose.

“I was complaining about being tight off, and obviously we got it not tight off,” Bowman revealed. “But it was really fast. I don’t know. My car was really good, and I don’t know why it did that.”

Wallace and Byron understood just as well that Bowman didn’t take them out intentionally, and both accepted that it was just bad luck for their Chase hopes.

Ahead of the Charlotte race, Wallace said that he was mathematically still in the championship battle, but the onus was on him to get better results out of his 23XI Toyota. But bad luck wasn’t something that he had accounted for in the build-up to the race. 

Before Charlotte, Byron was 12th on the leaderboard, and Wallace was 10th; they now sit in 11th and 13th, respectively. Coming into Charlotte, Wallace had four top-ten finishes in five Chase races. Wallace was 137 points behind championship leader Kyle Larson. Now he is 185 points behind Larson and technically too far behind to make up that ground, barring a miraculous four-race run. 

For Byron too, the Chase was just starting to look better. He began at Darlington with a DNF, but since then he finished in the top ten in every race before misfortune struck at Charlotte. Byron, too, is far from making a comeback to championship contention, sitting 208 points off his teammate.