Tyler Reddick, who entered Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series event at Sonoma Raceway with an eight-point lead in the standings, fell multiple laps down after Stage 1 with a mechanical issue.
After qualifying 11th on Saturday, Reddick faded throughout the 25-lap opening stint at the 1.99-mile road course, complaining to his No. 45 23XI Racing team about power steering issues. He finished Stage 1 30th before coming down pit road for repairs, losing six laps to the field. He gained two laps back at the Stage 2 end, with a caution for debris soon after.
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“It’s disappointing. We don’t really know what the issue was,” No. 45 crew chief Billy Scott told NASCAR.com. “It sounds like we were able to help it some, but not fully. I think we missed an opportunity to have a solid top-10 day, had decent speed and got the fastest lap and did what we could. Certainly disappointed to not get many points on the day.”
Speaking to TNT Sports after the race, Reddick explained that he was unsure whether to let the issue ride or spend laps on pit road diagnosing it.
“It’s so hard to say, in hindsight, if we made the right decision or not to work on it,” Reddick said. “Either way, we had a difficult road ahead, so I don’t know. I do feel good that it was nice we did decide to pit there, work on it, so we were able to get the Xfinity Fastest Lap out of the day, at least.”
Reddick, a California native, won five of the first nine races this season, including the season-opening Daytona 500. He led the series by as many as 129 points after Watkins Glen International in May. But after finishing 36th at Sonoma, he surrendered the points lead to Denny Hamlin for the first time this season.
“The reality is there is a reset coming in eight weeks or whatever it is, so this is good practice for that,” Scott said. “We’re going to keep focusing on what we can do, and we think that’s going out to win more races before we get to The Chase.”
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Despite gaining the points lead, Hamlin had his own issues. Entering Sonoma with wins in three of the last four races, he went spinning on a restart and plummeted through the field after showing early top 10 speed. He unofficially leads the series by one marker heading to Chicagoland Speedway next Sunday (6 p.m. ET, TNT Sports, truTV, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
“We got pretty fortunate today,” Reddick said. “[Hamlin] was running really, really good. Something happened, don’t really know what it was, but something coming out of the dirt right in front of me there. So all things considered, for the issues we had, we were very fortunate to really only lose nine points on the day to Denny, finishing dead last.”