Bubba Wallace will be looking to rekindle some old magic when he reunites with crew chief Jerry Baxter at Richard Petty Motorsports for the 2020 NASCAR Cup Series season.
Wallace, who is going into his third full-time season behind the wheel of the famed No. 43, is coming off his second consecutive season of placing 28th in the standings. This year, RPM and Wallace will look to continue making progress with the addition of Baxter to lead the team.
“Coming into this year I had talked to Jerry and we were obviously searching around for a crew chief just in that aspect only, just to help me and help me keep a cool head when the situations got tough,” Wallace said. “Jerry was all on board about it. When we started getting the ball rolling in the offseason and one thing led to another and it ended up working out. I am over the moon about it.”
Early in his NASCAR career, Wallace had success with Baxter in the NASCAR Gander RV & Outdoors Truck Series to the tune of five wins and a third-place finish in the 2014 standings. Both Wallace and Baxter have remained good friends over the years. In fact, Wallace keeps his boat at Baxter’s house.
“We had a lot of success together,” Wallace said. “We are looking to dig up some stuff that we have obviously put aside for three or four years now and bring it back and hopefully utilize that and make our program better.”
Prior to the 2019 season, Derek Stamets was promoted from lead engineer to Wallace’s crew chief when Drew Blickensderfer moved to Front Row Motorsports.
“With Drew departing going into last season we were able to give Derek an opportunity to step up from engineering role to crew chief,” Wallace said. “We told him this could change at any time, but our priorities were set in other areas getting through the crew chief role. Once we got that settled it was kind of put on the back burner. Derek and I worked well together, obviously that was our second year working together.
“When we showed up at the race track and needed adjustments made we got them adjusted and made our cars better from how we started the weekend. The things that we lacked was a little bit of communication and just kind of guiding me through… having a frustrating pit stop or something, Having that leadership role or that voice. That’s where I felt like I was alone.”
Wallace finished the 2019 season with a career-best 23.0 average finish, but only posted one top 10. That top 10 came in the regular-season finale at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Two of his other good finishes came in the final 10 races with a 12th at Richmond Raceway and 13th at Martinsville Speedway.
“How we finished the season last year was on some positive notes,” Wallace said. “We may have kind of stalled out at Texas, Phoenix and Homestead, but up to that point we were hitting on a lot of positive things.”
World Wide Technologies, U.S. Air Force and STP are among the partners that will be returning to RPM in 2020.
