Can Tyler Reddick use his Daytona 500 win as a springboard in 2026?

If the Daytona 500 is every driver’s opening statement for the season to come, Tyler Reddick delivered his message loud and clear on Sunday afternoon. His gutsy final-lap pass on Chase Elliott and Zane Smith gave his boss, Michael Jordan, an early birthday present like no other -- “It feels like I won a championship,” MJ said -- and provided 23XI Racing the defining victory of its six years in the NASCAR Cup Series. It also served as a much-needed reminder that Reddick is not a driver to be underestimated, especially in big moments. In a lot of ways, the 2025 season was the most challenging of Reddick’s Cup career. Off the track, he and his wife, Alexa, faced something far more important than a race: Their newborn son, Rookie, needed life-saving surgery to remove a tumor from his chest -- a frightening chapter that Reddick said the support of the NASCAR community helped them get through. (Reddick told interviewers on Sunday that Rookie was doing better, and he was on hand in Daytona as his dad won.) And while the stakes on the track were nowhere near as significant, Reddick was less dominant in competition as well. After winning multiple races in each of the previous three seasons -- including a trio of wins in 2024 -- Reddick went winless in 2025, posting his fewest top-fives (7) and top-10s (14) since joining 23XI from Richard Childress Racing after the 2022 season. Along the way, Reddick failed to build upon his first-ever trip to the Championship 4 in 2024 by going backward -- bowing out in the Round of 12.

There were signs, however, that Reddick’s down year was also not quite as down as it seemed on the surface. While his raw totals suffered, Reddick maintained some of the most consistent driving of his career in 2025, with an average finish of 14.5 -- up from 13.2 in 2024, but better than any other season of his career (including 2023, when he finished higher in the standings but had less week-to-week consistency). As part of that, he finished the year with only a single DNF, the fewest he ever had in a full season as a Cup driver. Reddick also went 52-24 head-to-head against others in 23XI equipment a year ago, good for a 68.4% matchup winning percentage against teammates that ranked No. 1 among all drivers in the Cup Series. (We even gave him one of our imaginary end-of-season awards for his performance in that category last November.) And as we noted with another of our awards, Reddick was tied with Chris Buescher for the winless drivers who “deserved” to win the most last season, based on their Driver Rating in each race. Both drivers would have been expected to win about once apiece under normal circumstances, an indication of how Reddick’s lack of wins were as much a matter of bad luck as anything else.

Some of Reddick’s usual hallmarks were admittedly a bit absent a year ago. After spending three seasons (2022-24) with the second-highest average start in the series -- at 10.0, trailing only Kyle Larson at 9.0 -- Reddick dropped to an average start of 12.2, “only” fifth-best behind Chase Briscoe, William Byron, Larson and Denny Hamlin. While Reddick actually won head-to-head over 58.3% of the drivers who started within the same five-slot block as him on the grid -- his best such showing against nearby starters in a season -- he couldn’t translate that into as many high finishes while qualifying lower than usual. His finishes on short tracks, and especially ovals, were also not as impressive as they were in the previous two seasons. In 2024, Reddick had a top-five (at Richmond) and a pair of other top-10s on short tracks, while he failed to register a single top-10 at the same tracks last year. And after a season of stellar results on intermediates and ovals in 2024 -- most notably including  his incredible pass of 23XI team owner Denny Hamlin and then defending champ Ryan Blaney while hugging the wall on the final lap of the playoff race at Homestead -- Reddick turned in little more than an average performance in 2025, with zero wins, three top-fives and three other top-10s in 18 starts.

Even amidst those results, though, Reddick would have held his own if the new Chase format was in place a year ago. Entering The Chase ranked eighth in the standings, he would have risen to fifth place (27 points off the lead) after finishing second at Darlington to begin the postseason slate. He would have spent most of the remaining Chase races about 80 points out of first place -- a bit outside the realm of what could be made up in a single afternoon -- but not bad for what was considered a frustrating season. The truth is that, much like Elliott -- another consistent star driver who can almost always be counted on to avoid disastrous finishes -- Reddick (rightly) has an advantage under any system that rewards steady point accumulation. While The Chase deliberately increases the value of wins as well, a return to a form of point racing, where every position matters, is good news for Reddick, who scored at least 11 points in all of his races last year and 25 or more in 22 of 36 starts. Even better news? Reddick immediately got the losing monkey off of his back to begin the 2026 season the way every driver dreams: in Victory Lane at Daytona. With fewer real-life worries weighing on his mind, a life-changing win already under his belt, a more favorable scoring system in place and (he hopes) better luck this time around, the driver of the No. 45 car seems set up to thrive going forward -- and to potentially race for something just as big as the 500, come November.