Tyler Reddick’s blast over the team radio near the end of Monday’s NASCAR Cup Series event at Michigan International Speedway marked an overflow of frustration after a wayward late-race pit stop cost him an opportunity for his second victory of the season. Reddick nearly spun out with a loose right-rear wheel less than a lap after the pit-road gaffe from his No. 45 23XI Racing Toyota crew, and he dropped to a 30th-place finish after a lengthy additional stop to right the wrong.
Tuesday, Reddick’s tone was far less amplified, given a day to reflect on how his team’s effort in the FireKeepers Casino 400 went. But with just three races left before the Cup Series Playoffs begin, the 27-year-old driver reiterated that the team’s execution needed cleaning up.
“Yeah, we’ve definitely got to get better there. We’ve got to improve,” Reddick told NASCAR.com by phone, some 24-odd hours after the checkered flag fell at the 2-mile track. “It’s just tough when that’s a mistake that we’ve made before, in the same situation, honestly. Not the last stop of the race, for sure, but in the lead, cycling back to the lead. Certainly, it’s just, it’s tough to … we’ve just got to learn from our mistakes. We can’t afford to repeat them.”
Reddick led seven laps and spent the most time out front in terms of the clock; he was scored first when rain forced a Sunday stoppage on Lap 75 of 200, leaving him in the lead for a 19-plus-hour red flag before the race resumed Monday afternoon.
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When a long green-flag stretch ended the race, Reddick was in prime position to contend. He was on the same pit strategy as eventual winner Chris Buescher, and both drivers made their final scheduled stops with 43 laps to go. The No. 45 Toyota required less gas during its service, allowing Reddick to leave the pits ahead of Buescher’s No. 17 RFK Racing Ford.
“Yeah, we were gone. It was over. I can say that with confidence,” Reddick said with a laugh, contemplating what might have been. “We ran behind them the whole time, and we were just waiting for the pit sequence. We didn’t need as much fuel, we knew we were going to be in front of them, and we were definitely better than he was. It was gonna be game over.”
The hitch was a hesitation by the No. 45 crew on the right-side tire change, specifically the right-rear wheel, which wasn’t fully fastened before Reddick returned to the race. As he got up to speed, Reddick’s car pitched sideways through Turns 3 and 4, and the wheel nearly dislodged before he limped back to pit road. The subsequent stop lasted more than a minute, and Reddick lost three laps before the checkered flag waved.
Reddick called the miscue “unacceptable” on the team scanner as he lashed out in the waning laps that followed at Michigan. His teammate, Bubba Wallace, had experienced similar issues in recent weeks, with pit-road gremlins that hurt his finishes at Nashville and Richmond.
Drivers and crews have to be perfect to have a shot to win. pic.twitter.com/5vin55tVDv
— NASCAR (@NASCAR) August 8, 2023
There was some consolation, Reddick said, to be found in the speed that his 23XI Racing team has shown to offset any issues that crop up. And Reddick said he wasn’t blameless in his assessment of the team’s overall performance.
“We’ve unfortunately had a lot of things unplanned happen this year,” Reddick said. “A lot of things have not went our way this year. We’ve made a lot of mistakes. I feel like we’ve learned from a lot of them, and we just have to learn from them because, again, we’ve made so many. We just can’t afford to repeat them. I mean, we’ve run through the majority of our season and still can just barely count on one hand the amount of races that went mistake-free, and that falls on me, too. I’ve made some pretty bad mistakes the last couple of weeks as well inside the car that have cost us wins as well, and it’s just frustrating for sure to see them get away.
“But at the same time, is it is cool to see the amount of pace that we have, knowing that if we just … it’s kind of nice to just know that we don’t have to be operating at 105 percent to win races anymore. It’s just about executing.”