KANSAS CITY, Kan. – Winning the Regular Season Championship offers a driver a substantial buffer to aid them in advancing in the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs. For the first time in his career, Tyler Reddick earned the honor after the checkered flag waved for the Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway.
Reddick then advanced to the Round of 12 but needed nearly all of his bonus from the regular-season title to do so after a slow first three outings in his 2024 postseason campaign.
With back-to-back results of 27th and 20th, respectively, across the last two race weekends, the No. 45 Toyota driver is in need of a quick turnaround Sunday at Kansas Speedway (3 p.m. ET, USA, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, NBC Sports App).
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“It was definitely not a good first round for us,” Reddick said during a press conference Saturday. “I think a number of things played into that, but we’ve done a really good job all year long of, at our worst, being able to still get a top 10 out of it. Some of the handling issues that we had at tracks where normally it’s not an issue for us really set that in stone for that first round. We still could have scored decent points, especially the last two races, but we were just missing things a little bit, made mistakes in qualifying on my behalf that put us back there.”
After the points reset to begin the Round of 12, Reddick stands 20 points above the elimination line in fourth place. It’s not the most comfortable gap for the 28-year-old wheelman, and it’ll be emphasized further after struggles for the No. 45 and the entire 23XI Racing organization at Kansas in the spring.
Reddick started 15th and ended up with a 20th-place result in that race. He attributed the lack of pace to several variables that occurred throughout the event.
“Qualifying didn’t exactly pan out perfect,” said Reddick, who starts fourth Sunday. “Made some mistakes on my end that put us out of the top 10. But as for the race itself, I’d say we were decent. I think we could have ran top five but certainly hitting the wall the way that I did to start the race, racing with the 48 did a lot of damage to our car and from there, it spiraled out of control. We ran something over, put a hole in the floor in the car. Just a lot of things went wrong to really hurt the performance.
“Seeing some of the tire wear that we had that some of the others didn’t, there’s things to be learned there. The finish wasn’t great, but as we prepared for this coming weekend, we weren’t panicked or in any kind of freak-out coming back here because the other Toyotas ran good, and we know where they’re at, and we’ve been very close to winning speed and had that potential in years past. So we knew that we weren’t going to have to look at a lot of things to improve or change coming back.”
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The next three races could be a feast for Reddick as he’s the defending winner of the Kansas playoff race, the most recent victor at Talladega Superspeedway and has three top 10s in four starts in the Round of 12’s finale at the Charlotte Motor Speedway road course.
Knowing what awaits in the coming weeks and rounds beyond, the No. 45’s ceiling appears to be high.
“We’re able to look at the results and understand why we were there,” Reddick said. “We’re not scratching our heads as to why we ran that bad. We know what caused it. It is what it is. It stinks but we get to reset and start over this round where we were to begin it.”