Past hoax · Filed Oct 16, 2026
NASCAR/Bubba Wallace Hoax
A noose was left in Bubba Wallace’s garage as a racist threat.
The claim
A noose was left in Bubba Wallace’s garage as a racist threat.
What it was
The FBI said the rope had been a garage-door pull, tied that way long before his team used the stall.
Timeline
Jun 21, 2020
A rope in the Talladega garage stall used by Bubba Wallace is reported as a noose.
Jun 22, 2020
NASCAR and the drivers treat it as a racist threat. The FBI is called.
Jun 23, 2020
The FBI says the rope was a garage-door pull, tied that way since 2019, before Wallace’s team used the stall. No federal crime.
The stall
The knot predates Wallace’s team using that garage. The noose caption has already had its day.
What aired
In June 2020 a rope in the garage stall used by Bubba Wallace at Talladega was reported as a noose, a racist threat against the only Black driver in NASCAR’s top series. The FBI opened a case. Drivers pushed his car to the front of the grid. The coverage was of a hate crime in the sport that had just banned the Confederate flag.
The record
The rope was a pull for the garage door. It had been tied in that loop since the fall of 2019, before Wallace’s team was assigned the stall. The FBI said there was no federal crime and no one to charge. Wallace had not been targeted. A door pull had been photographed at the worst possible moment in American life.
Left out
Left out was the age of the rope and the purpose of a garage-door pull, which is to be a loop you can grab. Also left out, in the first day, was any pause for the people who work in that garage and might have tied it. The pause lost to the convoy of solidarity, which is more moving than a janitor’s knot.
Why it stuck
It stuck because 2020 needed the noose to be real, and NASCAR had just spent a week being called out. A knot in a stall was the confirmation. When the FBI spoiled it, the solidarity had already been filmed. The film is what people remember. The door pull is a punchline they would rather not hear.