The owner of a North Carolina racetrack advertised so-called Bubba Rope for sale this week, alluding to a noose that was found earlier this month in the garage used by NASCAR driver Darrell “Bubba” Wallace Jr. at a track in Alabama.
According to a report by ESPN, 311 Speedway owner Mike Fulp posted on Facebook Marketplace on Wednesday that he was selling “Bubba Rope” for just under $10 each.
“Buy your Bubba Rope today for only $9.99 each, they come with a lifetime warranty and work great,” the post reportedly read.
Fulp’s post was taken down by Thursday afternoon after it was the subject of backlash from fans. Some said, according to ESPN, that they would no longer attend events at the track over the product.
The news follows controversy after Wallace, the only Black NASCAR driver, found rope pulled into a noose in the garage that had been assigned to him at the Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama.
The incident sparked investigations by both the FBI and NASCAR into a possible hate crime, but it was determined the noose had been in the garage since at least October and was being used as a garage door pull.
NASCAR has since released a photo stressing that the noose “was real,” and Wallace has responded that while he is glad it was not an intentional hate crime, he was still disturbed by the associations of a noose.
“I’ve been racing all of my life,” Wallace said. “We’ve raced out of hundreds of garages that never had garage pulls like that. So people that want to call it a garage pull and put out all the videos and photos of knots being as their evidence, go ahead, but from the evidence that we have — and I have — it’s a straight-up noose.”
NASCAR just released a photo of the garage pull rope that was fashioned into a noose at Talladega. pic.twitter.com/gRAUAJoYv2
— Jeff Gluck (@jeff_gluck) June 25, 2020
Fulp reportedly deleted more than just the ad for “Bubba Rope” after multiple users resurfaced Facebook posts including one saying of Black people: “I think we should give them a bucket of Kentucky Fried chicken, 2 watermelons and a plane ride back to Africa.”
In another since-deleted post, he mocked the death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man whose death last month in Minneapolis police custody has sparked nationwide calls for police reform and an end to racial injustice.
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) condemned Fulp’s remarks in a statement to the Winston-Salem Journal, saying “this incident of racism is horrific and shameful. North Carolina is better than this.”
According to the Journal, local NAACP leaders also condemned the posts.
“It is horrible that someone would post something of that nature,” Reidsville NAACP chapter president Jeff Crisp said of the post. “This is not the time for comments like this, just causing unnecessary tension.”
Fulp and race track officials did not respond to requests for comment by ESPN or local outlets.
