Tyler Reddick and his 23XI Racing team are looking for answers.
The NASCAR Cup Series regular season champion has not shown the same form thus far in the postseason. Reddick has an average finish of 19.5 through the first four races with one top-10 finish and 21 stage points. Last Sunday, he was an also-ran at Kansas Speedway — where he won last year — taking a 25th-place finish.
“[We’re] definitely concerned,” Reddick said in response to a question from RACER. “What got us to winning the regular season championship is car performance — with that good handling as well. They’re kind of hand in hand; you do have weekends where you have fast race car but it’s not going to handle as good. But for us, we’ve just been lacking performance and a good-handling car.”
A sixth-place finish at Atlanta Motor Speedway is Reddick’s best in the postseason. He has not earned a top five since winning at Michigan International Speedway (Aug. 18), which is also the last time he led a double-digit number of laps in a Cup Series race.
“Yeah, at this point it’s definitely a headscratcher,” Reddick continued. “I feel like all of us coming off of the regular season, I felt no emphasis change what I was doing. I don’t think anyone on this team has either. We just haven’t been putting together good races. We haven’t had speed; we haven’t been able to get stage points.
“It’s been tough.”
Kansas Speedway was one of the biggest surprises for Reddick. Not only was he the defending winner at the speedway, but Reddick has excelled on intermediate racetracks. He qualified fourth for Sunday’s race, but averaged a 12th place running position and only led laps through a green flag pit cycle.
“You look at Kansas — we did run the right-side shark fin and while I feel like a lot of folks on the NASCAR side felt it wasn’t going to change the characteristic of how the car drives, it was a massive swing in how the car reacts to sliding,” Reddick said. “I thought I was driving a Gen 6 car again this past Sunday because you could slide it so much farther than you could before. Typically, with this car, if you get sideways, you’re wrecking and spinning out. But you could slide it and just continue to slide it. So, I don’t know if that’s part of it.
“I think on our end we understood it was going to be a decent change to the car but we qualified OK, we started the race off with decent speed and knew balance migration was going to be a struggle. It was bad for a lot of the Toyotas but it was really on the extreme side for us. So, nothing [we] really can point our fingers at, to be honest.”
Reddick entered the postseason with 28 playoff points as the No. 3 seed. He went from 20 points above the cutline before Kansas Speedway to four points below the cutline, the first driver out of a transfer spot, after the race. The series heads to Talladega Superspeedway this weekend, where Reddick won in the spring.