(Photo: Sam Draiss | The Podium Finish)
LONG POND, Pa. — Tyler Reddick didn’t downplay the fact that his No. 45 team for 23XI Racing hasn’t been firing on all cylinders the last several weeks.
The 27-year-old from Corning, California is in the midst of one of his worst stretches in his NASCAR Cup Series career, placing outside the top 20 in six of the last eight races. In the two-month span, Reddick has dropped from sixth to 13th in points.
Reddick finished sixth last week at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, but it still wasn’t the clean race the fourth-year driver wished for.
“We got to have clean races, and we still didn’t do that unfortunately in New Hampshire. I sped on pit road the second stop of the day and put us to the back and then we had to fight like crazy just to get back to the front,” Reddick said at Pocono Raceway on Saturday. “It’s just wild, silly things. Every time we have something go wrong in our day, it’s just a new thing that hasn’t happened before. We just got to eliminate that completely from our vocabulary.”
From a loose wheel at Nashville, to a late flat tire at Sonoma, to pit road penalties — Reddick has nearly seen it all.
The speed, however, has been there. Reddick won at Circuit of the Americas in the spring to secure a spot in the Cup Series playoffs. He’s finished in the top 10 eight times, but on average, finished six spots behind where he qualifies.
Though three of Reddick’s four Cup Series victories have come on road courses, some of his cleanest races this season have come at larger race tracks. He finished ninth at Kansas Speedway and fifth at Charlotte Motor Speedway. Reddick also has top fives at Phoenix Raceway and Bristol Dirt.
But as the Cup Series inches closer to the playoffs, Reddick’s primary focus is cleaning up all the mistakes — something he can’t pinpoint in particular.
“We still manage to get a good finish out of the day considering depending on what exactly goes wrong, but we just got to stop it completely, honestly,” he said. “On a bad day for this team, I feel like an incident-free race, we’ll run 10th, no problem. We haven’t been able to do that. We ran sixth at New Hampshire, which was good, but we had a month and a half of really bad finishes because things would go wrong and derail our entire day.”
Reddick will have an opportunity to right the ship for 23XI Racing on Sunday at Pocono Raceway, a place where he finished runner-up last year with Richard Childress Racing.
Clean air, he said, will be king. Reddick qualified seventh — it’ll be a matter of just keeping it there.
“I think collectively, a lot of the drivers in the field felt like this was one of the most difficult races last year to manage traffic,” Reddick said. “All the Toyotas were really solid here last year — speed has not been the problem of this team.”
