CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Bubba Wallace has a theory that would explain how the early season good fortune of his 23XI Racing teammate Tyler Reddick turned suddenly sour this summer. It involves a seven-time NASCAR Cup Series champion, his mythical golden horseshoe and a transfer of motorcoach ownership.
When Jimmie Johnson’s transportation came into Reddick’s possession, so did the good-luck charm. Or so the theory goes.
“I think his bus broke down, and they must have taken a horseshoe out,” Wallace said Wednesday, with a hint of deadpan smirk. “That’s what it is, so he’s back to reality.”
Luck or the lack of it might be a simple way to describe how this strange season has gone for Reddick, who enters The Chase presented by Mobil 1 after riding the wild undulations of the Cup Series regular season. He’s ranked third of the 16 seeds entering Sunday’s Cook Out Southern 500 (5 p.m. ET, USA Network, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), one of five Toyota drivers among the top six in the re-racked points for the 10-race postseason.
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Reddick was once the presumptive No. 1 seed, thanks to his history-making bolt out of 2026’s starting gates. The 30-year-old California native captured his biggest triumph in the season-opening Daytona 500, then rattled off two more wins in a row as part of a seismic streak of five victories through the first nine races. Reddick led the standings for the first 17 races of the season, padding his advantage to 129 points by mid-spring.
That seemingly insurmountable edge fizzled as the calendar turned toward summer. A series of on-track incidents and other breakages set the No. 45 team back, and Denny Hamlin — a fellow Toyota driver and his team co-owner at 23XI — roared past him at Sonoma Raceway in June. The last 12 races have included five results of 30th or worse, and Reddick ended up 133 points behind Hamlin as the regular season closed.
It’s a stretch, he says, that’s made his No. 45 group more battle-tested for the 10 races ahead.
“Yeah, almost like a coin. There was two sides to it, really,” Reddick said during Wednesday’s Chase Media Day, once pressed to describe the season thus far. “We’d be on or we’d be off, and not necessarily from a base standpoint of just executing and having the clean days versus having catastrophic days. So yeah, I mean, I’d say if it was all sunshine and roses all year long, you feel good about what you do, but it is important to have a degree of toughness, a degree of understanding how to deal with losses, how to deal with failures, how to deal with whatever it is, and we’ve been on both sides of it this year. We kind of know what it’s like.”
So does Hamlin, who assembled his own three-race win streak with the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing team — a surge that roughly coincided with Reddick’s downturn.
“Yeah, it’s NASCAR racing at its finest,” said Hamlin, a 21-year Cup Series veteran who knows the sport’s cyclical nature better than most. “It’s the ups and downs and the peaks and the valleys that you have, and so I do think that they feel this is a great reset for them. Again, they were bleeding points heavily over the last couple of months, and so if you’re them, you’re like, ‘man, we’re right back in this thing. We’re less than 50 behind.’ So I think that they feel like the schedule is going to be very good for them. They’re going to probably Tyler’s best race track here in Darlington to kick off The Chase, so I think that their confidence is bounced back due to nothing more than the schedule.”
Reddick has found favor with Darlington Raceway in the past, and he cashed in for his first victory at the historic track’s Goodyear 400 back in March. There, he faced some of the adversity he mentioned, with his No. 45 crew overcoming electrical gremlins by changing out a battery mid-race, rallying from the back of the pack to convert a satisfying win from the pole position.
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Some of the Chase optimism is shared by his manufacturer mates, especially after Toyota drivers won 14 of 26 regular-season races and placed six drivers in the postseason field (Chevrolet and Ford have five each). That group includes four-time winner Hamlin, a two-time winner in Ty Gibbs, Chicagoland champ Chase Briscoe and both Christopher Bell and Wallace — both of whom are aiming for their first victory of the season.
Wallace has had a closer view than most of Reddick’s fluctuations as his teammate, one who is striving for the shared goal of consistency in the 10-race span that will decide the championship.
“But no, it’s just that’s the way the sport goes, right?” Wallace said. “It’s ups and downs, and how you manage it through it all, which is something I’m still working on. This is my ninth year in Cup, and you still learn something each and every weekend, each and every day of how to be better.”
Reddick says there’s no need for any grand reset and that flipping a so-called switch for the 10 races ahead isn’t a focal point. The majority of the tracks in the postseason rotation line up well, he says, with question marks arising at World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway (Sept. 13) and Martinsville Speedway (Nov. 1), where he says there’s room for improvement.
Horseshoe or not, Reddick says he’s ready to move forward.
“All things seem to be going in the right direction at the right time,” Reddick said. “Yeah, obviously, it’d have been great to hang on to the points lead. It’d have been great to not fight the things that we did, but as much as the bad finishes were hard on our standings and the points, we learned a lot from it, and with this Chase, the gap is gone and we’re re-seeded, and we’re going to go now.”
