Bubba Wallace may have won the biggest race of his career on Sunday by capturing one of NASCAR’s crown jewels: the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. However, he couldn’t have done it without his pit crew, led by crew chief Charles Denike, whose strategic plans for varying race scenarios ultimately led the No. 23 driver to victory lane.
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This is Denike’s first season as a crew chief in the Cup Series, replacing Robert “Bootie” Barker, who was promoted to the competition department during the off-season by 23XI Racing.
Denike’s previous tenure as a crew chief included two Xfinity Series races for current NASCAR vice president Ben Kennedy in 2017, and 112 races over five seasons in the Truck Series, including 10 wins.
Thus far this season, Denike led Wallace to Sunday’s breakthrough win, along with four top-fives and eight top-10 finishes in the first 22 races. Wallace came into Sunday’s race on the bubble of the Cup standings. But with the win, he now has an automatic berth into the 16-driver, 10-race Cup playoffs.
How Bubba got there on Sunday, however, is a story in and of itself. Sure, he drove the winning car, but it was Denike and his crew that laid the foundation. That’s why from opening practice at Indy on Friday, Denike felt confident and had a gut feeling something good was going to happen.
It certainly helped that Wallace qualified on the outside pole for the race and ultimately led six times for 30 laps, including the crucial final circuits around the 2.5-mile oval, holding off Team Hendrick’s hard-charging and quick-closing Kyle Larson.
But it was also due to Denike’s understanding of the race’s significance, which helped Wallace overcome his waning chances and qualify for the playoffs for only the second time in his Cup career. That meant a lot of hard work and also thinking outside the box for Denike & Co., including coming up with various plans and potential deviations from those plans, if necessary.
In other words, Denike may have had a Plan A, but he also had several sub-plans: call them Plan A-1, Plan A-2, Plan A-3 and so forth. Let’s let Denike explain things in his own words.
Friday
“Practice was a bit chaotic because all the cars were on the racetrack at the same time. We had two sets of tires, we only had 25 minutes, there was a lot going on. We did one run of six laps and then we were going to do another run of ten laps. We never got a great read on the car. We never got great track position to run. There was just always something happening.”
Saturday
“Then we went into qualifying, and Bubba said, ‘Oh, I don’t completely know what I had in the car.’ And I said, ‘Well, this is superstar qualifying. This is what we show up to do.’
“I said afterwards, while it may seem chaotic, we checked all the boxes that we needed to check. We had clean air. We had traffic. We did a pit road entry, pit road exit, we did an adjustment to understand the balance.
“Those are all things that you work through to make sure that you feel prepared on Saturday night to make your changes going into Sunday. Then, we have a lot of data at our disposal to look at to get ready for qualifying.
“So we stepped through that. Then it’s on him to go out there and perform and show everybody what he’s capable of doing, and that’s what we did on Saturday.”
Sunday
“Then obviously he carried that over to today (Sunday). Our planning for what kind of strategy we were going to do and what the options were, was really predicated on where we qualified.
“So just knowing that we were up front, we could lay the groundwork on how to maximize our day, stay there, and then put ourselves in contention to start Stage 3, which is what we were able to do.”
And the rest is history. Bubba doesn’t have to worry any longer about being on the playoff bubble. He, Denike and the rest of their No. 23 team can focus on the upcoming playoffs.
Who knows, after being the surprise team of the Brickyard 400, could Wallace and Denike become the surprise team of the playoffs?
