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Suspended NASCAR driver says he didn't intentionally draw a swastika on his toaster strudel

Truck Series driver Josh Reaume was suspended indefinitely by NASCAR on Tuesday for violating its social media policy. And according to Reaume, that violation was unintentional.

Reaume, who owns a team in the Truck Series, says he posted a picture to Snapchat of a toaster strudel last week. That seems pretty innocuous, right?

Well, the icing on that strudel was drawn in the shape of a swastika. And Reaume said he somehow didn’t realize that he had drawn a strudel swastika when he posted the picture to Snapchat.

From TobyChristie.com:

“What happened was, I made a toaster strudel, I put icing on it. I put icing on it arbitrarily. I can — now, that this has become such a significant thing in my life, everything is crystal clear now in what I was thinking. I was mindlessly putting icing on a toaster strudel thinking about how I was going to arrange to get my daughter to day care in the morning because that’s my responsibility and I was flying out to Phoenix the next day.

“When I was done, I took a picture, I wrote, ‘Snack time,’ and posted it to my Snapchat, which I had no idea it was even more than my immediate friend group. [The account is] private, it’s not even under my name, to my knowledge. Now, shame on me for maybe not fully understanding SnapChat, and I don’t care to get on social media in the immediate future, but somebody obviously screen-shotted it or did something with it and pushed it to NASCAR. I don’t know what the image looks like.”

Reaume apologized for his actions in that interview and said that “there was not a bone in my body that had an intent of doing that.” But his explanation feels a little flimsy. How was his mind too preoccupied with family stuff to pay attention to how he was icing his strudel, yet clear enough to remember to post a picture of the strudel with the allegedly unintentional icing swastika to Snapchat?

Reaume drove in Friday night’s Truck Series finale at Phoenix and found out that he was indefinitely suspended by NASCAR that weekend. The suspension means that he’ll have to complete sensitivity training to return to the series, and given that Reaume says he’s repentant, it seems likely that he’ll be reinstated before the 2021 season begins in February.

His actions are different than those of Mike Wallace. The longtime NASCAR veteran was suspended earlier in the fall for Facebook posts that have since been deleted. Instead of apologizing for what he posted to Facebook, Wallace fought his NASCAR suspension and appealed it twice. Both of those appeals were denied and Wallace is still indefinitely suspended.

Reaume, 30, competed in 12 of 23 Truck Series races in 2020. His team fielded trucks for myriad drivers over the course of the season and scored a top-10 finish with Jason White at the wheel at Daytona in February.

Josh Reaume is seen during driver introductions for the NASCAR Xfinity Series auto race at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course Saturday, Aug. 15, 2015 in Lexington, Ohio. (AP Photo/Tom E. Puskar)
Josh Reaume has been indefinitely suspended by NASCAR. (AP Photo/Tom E. Puskar)

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Nick Bromberg is a writer for Yahoo Sports.

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