Tyler Reddick reflects on the highs and lows of being a NASCAR Cup driver the day after placing 30th at Michigan International Speedway, a race he very well could have won if not for a wayward pit stop with 43 laps remaining.
“That was both all in one swing,” said the driver of 23XI Racing’s No.45 Toyota. “Practically everyone I’ve talked to, everyone I know, has told me that they waked away from the TV for about five minutes during the Michigan race and everything went all… Yeah, you know what I’m saying. It all went to hell for us.”
Twenty-three races in, Reddick sits 13th in points with one race win, six top fives and nine top 10s. With an average starting position of 10.739 and an average finishing position of 17.522, Reddick is pleased with the speed of his cars, but also frustrated by mistakes and miscues – like the loose rear wheel at Michigan – that have haunted the No. 45 team thus far this racing season.
“Well, honestly, our average finishing position and our average running position, that’s where it gets frustrating,” said Reddick. “I don’t feel like we’ve brought a 15th place car to the racetrack once this year. We’ve been much better than that every single week and we’ve just not capitalized on it. It’s been tough. It’s been frustrating. This last weekend at Michigan was a perfect example of it. The hard part is having the speed. We have the speed, which is awesome. It’s just hard. It’s hard to live with, honestly. It’s tough. It’s hard on everybody when we just continue to not capitalize on the speed that we bring to the racetrack.”
The NASCAR Next Gen car has fostered an incredibly competitive environment throughout this year’s Cup season, and Reddick acknowledged that a team and a driver must execute perfectly to have any hope of winning.
“It really is that way now, and I feel like we’re in a spot with our car’s performance to play it in a way where we don’t have to push it 100 percent to win the races,” he said. “That’s really hard to do, honestly. I think that’s what we’re capable of, and we’ve just got to have some smooth races here. We’ve got three weekends now to go in the right direction. We’ve just got to plug away and we’ve got to have some smooth races and finish where our car is capable of finishing.”
It was Reddick’s belief in the 23XI Racing organization that drew him to the fold in the first place.
“I saw the process from afar, ” said Reddick who came to 23XI from Richard Childress Racing. “By bringing in Kurt Busch and having Bubba Wallace that first year and starting where they did, and going into this Next Gen platform with Kurt coming on board and bringing in all of the people that they did, they contended right from the get-go. There was a lot of speed out of the cars and over the course of last year, they just continued to get better and better and better. I feel like we’ve picked right back up right where they left off and that climbing is still going.
“We’re just in a tough spot now, collectively, with both teams. We’ve just got to clean up our mistakes. That comes with the higher expectations that we put on ourselves because of the performance that we have. We expect to stay in the top five and contend, so when we don’t capitalize on that, it gets frustrating. But we are still doing the right things. We are still going in the right way.”
Keeping a keen eye on Reddick and company is team co-owner and full-time Cup racer Denny Hamlin. So how has Hamlin been as a team owner?
“Denny has been great,” Reddick said. “He’s a really hands-on owner. He understands things with his owner’s hat on and he understands the driver’s side of it, as well. That’s a unique ownership perspective that really, until recently, we haven’t seen in NASCAR for a long time. A lot of the guys that are owners have been owners for a long time, but that has been many years ago now, so looking at what Denny brings to the table is impressive.
“The people he has worked with as a driver and knowing that those were the people that he wanted to be a part of this team certainly put together a good group. It was really cool to hear from him in how much he wanted me to be a part of this team, and others did too, and how he had a plan for the group. The things that he and Michael [Jordan] have been working on with the whole ownership group made me realize that this is where I wanted to be.
“It’s frustrating to be sitting here talking about that if we can clean up the mistakes, we can be winning races left and right. But again, this early on in this team’s history, to be doing what we are doing is great. We’re doing a lot of things right and it’s important not to lose sight of that as we really focus on cleaning things up.”
Next up for Reddick and the No. 45 race team will be this weekend’s race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Road Course.
“Indy is a huge opportunity,” said Reddick who is currently ninth in projected playoffs points. “Returning to Indy after winning there one year ago is really is really exciting. It was almost a perfect weekend, really. We were really fast in practice, and we got the pole in qualifying and won the race. We led a lot of laps and had a really strong car. Obviously I’m with a different team and a different manufacturer now, but when I look at what we brought to the Circuit of the Americas earlier in the year, I’m really confident that we’ll do good. At Sonoma this year we had really good speed, but mistakes took us out of that event. At the Chicago street race we were in position to win before I unfortunately made a mistake that I don’t make often. We let some get away for sure, but the speed has been there and I’m going to have a lot of confidence in that when we get there.
“We’ve got to have three smooth races at Indy, Watkins Glen and Daytona before we get started with the playoffs. Like I said before, speed is not our problem. We can’t afford to take ourselves out of it. We’ve just got to have some smooth races. If we can do that, it’ll put us back on the path I feel like we need to be on. It’ll get us in a good mindset as we kick off the playoffs. There are a bunch of tracks that really are good for us in the playoffs. I look at Darlington and we were fast there. Vegas and Kansas, we were fast at those tracks.
“Something we haven’t lost sight of is that as frustrating as this is, something we haven’t lost sight of is how cool it is to do what we do. To be in the mix as much as we are… we’ll just keep using the positives to motivate ourselves and to keep ourselves where we need to be mindset-wise by covering our bases and learning from our mistakes.”