(Photo: Wayne Riegle | The Podium Finish)
SPEEDWAY, Ind. — Tyler Reddick and his No. 45 23XI Racing team pieced together a relatively clean afternoon to score a fourth-place finish in Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Road Course.
The winner of last year’s race, Reddick qualified second outside of Daniel Suarez for Sunday’s Verizon 200 at the Brickyard. Playing a similar strategy as the other leaders, Reddick stayed out until after the end of Stage 1 to maintain track position and earn points. The goal: make it a simple, two-stop race.
Reddick ended up fourth in the opening stage and crew chief called him to pit road on Lap 16, one circuit sooner than Stage 1 and race winner Michael McDowell. The No. 45 team had what Reddick deemed a “slow stop,” but he didn’t lose significant time.
In the midst of varying strategies, bossman Denny Hamlin took Stage 2 on Lap 35 as he maxed out his fuel window from the initial start to score an additional playoff point. Reddick finished eighth.
But as the race continued to stay green, Reddick couldn’t go anywhere. He ran behind McDowell, Suarez and Chase Elliott the rest of the day and couldn’t get a caution to bunch the field back up. Elliott ended up second as Suarez took third after a mistake in his final stop of the race.
“We definitely had really good pace in the second half of the race,” Reddick explained after the race. “We just didn’t have the best start and weren’t quite as fast in the first half and got behind it. We short-pitted them, but we had a slow stop and wasn’t in position to lunge them off of pit road, and that was kind of the story.
“We didn’t have a chance to get back around Daniel (Suarez). We could drop off about 10 car lengths and get right back to his bumper. Our SiriusXM Toyota Camry TRD was better, but not good enough to complete the pass. I think AJ Allmendinger (a lapped car) with much fresher tires had to push really hard to get around Daniel, so that is the story of it – just unfortunately, hard to pass.”
With an overall clean race, the result broke a stretch of four of five races where the No. 45 team had made a critical error on pit road. He snagged his seventh top-five finish of the season, now just three behind his total last season with Richard Childress Racing.
Reddick sits 12th in points and is locked into the playoffs with his win at Circuit of the Americas in March. Just two races remain in the regular season — Watkins Glen International and Daytona International Speedway. Reddick is winless at either track in Cup, but three of his four series victories have come on road courses. In Xfinity, he won three times on superspeedways.
The Go Bowling at The Glen is set for Sunday, August 20 at 3 p.m. ET on USA Network, MRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. Kyle Larson has won the last two times the Cup Series has visited the Finger Lakes region.
