RICHMOND, Va. — The two other members of the NASCAR Xfinity Series’ Big Three opened their playoff quests Friday night with finishes on the virtual podium. For defending series champ Tyler Reddick, Richmond Raceway produced a head-scratching result that left him “kind of baffled.”
Reddick eked out a 10th-place finish in Friday’s Go Bowling 250, the opening event in the seven-race postseason. Meanwhile, fellow regular-season dominator Christopher Bell pounced for his series-leading seventh win of the season, and Big Three member Cole Custer settled for third.
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Reddick finished outside the top 10 in both stages, and only a hard-fought rally past fellow postseason hopefuls Ryan Sieg and Brandon Jones in the closing laps salvaged a top-10 final result.
“I’m not necessarily frustrated, just confused more than anything,” said Reddick, who thought his car had a flat tire near the end of the first stage. “We kind of had to rebound through Stage 2 and we still didn’t have a better car. I just, we’re just kind of baffled as to what happened to our car. We didn’t think it was that bad, and it was in the race. We just had to fight really, really hard to get every spot we could there and we were fortunate to at least get to 10th.”
Reddick’s Richard Childress Racing No. 2 Chevrolet team may have had momentum from last weekend’s victory in the regular-season finale at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. But crew chief Randall Burnett said that an otherwise mundane fourth-place run at the .75-mile Richmond track in April didn’t hold much promise for a turnaround. As a result, Burnett & Co. opted to try different setups in an attempt to offset the dread.
“We’ve worked really hard on it, just for whatever reason, we just haven’t figured out how to get around this place just yet,” Burnett told NASCAR.com. “We were OK with the balance in practice, but it was pretty slow, so the crew chief decided he was going to change a bunch of stuff going into the race and probably didn’t help it any. I’ve got to stop doing that. We just didn’t have it tonight. This was definitely one of those places in the (playoffs), this was probably the one that had our biggest concern coming in here.”
The next concern for the Xfinity Series’ postseason field of 12 comes at the Charlotte Motor Speedway oval and road-course layout, which returns for its second edition next weekend. Reddick still holds a 38-point buffer over the cut-off line with the Roval then Dover to close out the postseason’s opening round.
“The Roval’s a fantastic place for opportunity, but even more fantastic of a place to wad your cars up,” Reddick said. “We’re in a really good spot going into that race. I think if we do a little bit better job of managing our race than we did here today, we should be able to come out of the Roval in a good enough spot to just be smart at Dover and be fine. We’re going to have speed again here soon, I’m sure.”