Freddie Kraft, Erik Jones react to disastrous Bubba Wallace Chicago qualifying run: 'Sorry, buddy'

Freddie Kraft and Erik Jones discussed Bubba Wallace‘s rough qualifying run at Chicago this past weekend. On the Door Bumper Clear podcast, Kraft, who is Wallace’s spotter, recapped what went wrong with the No. 23 Toyota.

“We go on the track, Bubba’s fastest in practice, and we’re pretty excited to go qualify,” Kraft said. “We go out there and I don’t know what happened. It was out of my section, but coming to (Turn) 11, the start/finish line, Bubba spins out. Well, then he’s trying to get out of the 38’s (Zane Smith) way, ends up almost backing into Erik’s way, ruins Erik’s lap in the process.

“We all go in, we all cool down, go back out to make our next run. Erik’s out there behind us somewhere. We spin out back in the fence. Instant yellow comes out, which is weird that I guess they abandoned that after Saturday. But the yellow comes out instantly and we ruin Erik’s lap for the second time. Then he qualified right there when we did backwards twice. As I’m leaving, I walked right by Erik and I was like ‘Sorry, buddy. I don’t know what to tell you.'”

More on Bubba Wallace’s qualifying run at Chicago

Erik Jones then reacted to the incident at qualifying. “I wasn’t going to qualify that well,” he said. “…Yeah, we started 35th, so that was a good start to the weekend.”

Kraft then went on to share more on Wallace competing at road courses. “Qualifying at road courses, Bubba has been really kind of following Tyler [Reddick] around, and it’s been helping, obviously,” Kraft said. “COTA, we were front row. So this time, they’re like ‘Alright, here’s the plan. We’re going to do this kind of the same process, but we’re going by ourselves.’ …So then afterwards, they were like, ‘This week, we’ll probably go back to following Tyler.'”

Because of the issues Bubba Wallace had at qualifying, he started the Chicago Street Race at P37. He worked his way to the top 10 in the final laps of the race but was spun out by Alex Bowman and earned a P28 finish. Jones had a P35 start and finished 25th.