It’s a tale of two emotions for 23XI Racing’s Tyler Reddick heading into The Chase this Fall.
The Corning, California-native is getting a chance to avenge his struggles for his No. 45 Toyota Camry XSE team, led by Billy Scott, after what has been a horrific Summer by all accounts, with six finishes of 25th place or worse in the last 12 races, which cost Reddick the highest seed for the points reset to his team owner, Denny Hamlin.
However, the question lingering on the minds of everybody watching the performance of the No. 45 from the outside is whether this team, that won the first three and five of the first nine NASCAR Cup Series events of the year, can get back into the form that made them early-season title favorites.
With an 11th-place finish at Richmond, a pole and an eighth at New Hampshire, and a third-place result at Daytona this past weekend, it appears that Reddick and 23XI Racing might be heading on the right track as the tail end of the season rolls around.
Reddick agrees, saying Wednesday during NASCAR Cup Series Chase Media Day, “I think we’ve done a good job of putting it behind us each and every week. It is more than bad luck. There are things that have happened that we have learned from, and most importantly how we respond and handle those moments and make the most out of them isn’t something that we need to forget or move on from.”
The struggles were real, no doubt, but Reddick believes that facing adversity as much as they did in the second half of the season may be a tool in their belt for when something goes wrong during The Chase.
“Yeah, ideally, it’s good to have good points days, but as much as you want to think you will have 10 races go exactly as planned, no mistakes, no issues – things are going to happen that you are not ready for and you are going to have to fight through adversity at points. We’ve been through enough of it and ready if we have more of it.”
Yes, the points have been reset heading into Sunday’s 500-miler at Darlington (leaving the No. 45 third in points, 35 behind Denny Hamlin), but Reddick doesn’t believe that his team is going to need to flip a switch to make something happen in The Chase – the pieces are there, they just have to come together seamlessly.
“I don’t think we need to flip a switch or do anything. We are going to be rolling back into tracks where we have won at, where we have led laps at, where we are extremely fast at,” Reddick pointed out. “Certainly, you could say there is a question mark there at Gateway. There is one at Martinsville, but that doesn’t mean we are going to go there and be bad. We know that we have more room to improve. I’ve looked at other track types that we visited the first time this year – we made good gains at tracks that we weren’t happy where we were a year ago or a previous year.”
“All things seem to be going the right direction at the right time. It would have been great to hang on to the points lead. It would have been great to not fight the things that we did, but as much as the bad finishes were hard on our standing in the points, we learned a lot from it and with this Chase, the gap is gone and we are seeded and we are going to go now.”
Heading into the final 10 races of the season, Reddick says there’s more pressure involved in this format than in the previous one.
“You don’t get bailed out at all. We set our points to what they are now, and you won’t get saved by a round. Yes, you won’t get eliminated, either, but you are not going to get saved by a reset. If you have two bad races, and win one, hey we survived and we moved on to the next round. It is going to be a totally different mindset, and it will be interesting to see how that plays out.”
Reddick will begin The Chase from third in standings, and heads to Darlington Raceway, where he won the Goodyear 400 in the Spring.
