Bubba Wallace at Daytona in a sports car; 'any seat time is good seat time' | Rolex 24 testing

DAYTONA BEACH — Bubba Wallace’s road to his first sports-car race began with a phone call to Toyota management last summer.

“I said, ‘Hey, I need help,’ ” Bubba said this weekend at Daytona International Speedway.

Bubba came to Daytona earlier than usual in order to compete in next Friday’s four-hour BMW Endurance Challenge, which precedes the Saturday-Sunday Rolex 24. He’s here this weekend for three days of testing the Toyota Supra he’ll share with fellow NASCAR racers John Hunter Nemechek and Corey Heim.

It was after last August’s road race at Indianapolis when Bubba decided he needed to step up his road-course efforts. So he made the call to Toyota’s racing management.

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“They said, ‘we’re on it’,” Bubba recalled Friday.”So in the offseason they asked if I wanted to run this. I said, ‘hell yeah, why not?’ ”

After going hat in hand to Toyota in August, Bubba finished a respectable 12th and 16th in final two road-course races of the season. Road courses, statistically speaking, remain his weakest playground among the variety of tracks hosting NASCAR races — in 26 career starts, his average finish is 24th.

While the Supra he’ll wheel at Daytona is very different from the Camry-based sedan he pilots in NASCAR, “any seat time is good seat time,” he said.

“It’s just a matter of race-craft — figuring out how to pass, set up passing, different things like that.”

In road racing, the hardest element to master is one basically non-existent on the familiar oval tracks: Braking. Bubba says he's quickly trying to improve on slowing down, which isn't a natural instinct.

“For me it’s been braking,” he said. “It’s been making sure you trust the car and trust yourself to be able to drive it in to the absolute limit, making it stick and making it work.

“All race cars are on edge, so if I can create a bigger threshold where I feel comfortable, that’s the big thing.”

Some oval-track racers trust the brakes too much when diving into a turn, others don’t trust them enough.

“I was on the timid side,” Bubba said. “It was taking me all weekend to get where we needed to be. By the time the checkered flag was out, I was like, ‘Ah, I’ve got it!’

“Now I’ve started going out and ‘sending it,’ if you will, and it’s been paying off.”

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Bubba Wallace says 'I need help,' so NASCAR racer at Daytona for Roar