It was very much not 'just a knot': it was very clearly a noose, and as I already mentioned, it was confirmed at the time that only that single garage stall out of all of them at every NASCAR track had the pull rope tied in that way. It turned out that it hadn't been put there to target Bubba Wallace, but it was still even at best a sick joke in bad humor put there by some previous inhabitant of that garage stall.
No, a small noose is just a pull handle that the knotter decided to create in a noose shape.
A real "threat or a sick joke" would surely have used a human-sized noose hung somewhere else, as opposed to a hand-sized knot quite appropriate for its role as a pull handle for a garage door.
