Tyler Reddick entered NASCAR Cup playoffs with the regular season trophy in hand, but the first rounds were not what he had hoped for.
After escaping the Atlanta chaos with a sixth-place finish, he was 26th at Watkins Glen and 20th at Bristol. Thanks to his many bonus points, he still moved forward to the Round of 12, but a repeat of that could end his title hopes this weekend at Kansas Speedway.
"It was definitely not a good first round for us," admitted Reddick during a Saturday press conference in Kansas. "Yeah, 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 the first round.
"I think we still could’ve scored decent points especially the last two races. We were just missing things a little bit – made mistakes in qualifying on my behalf that put us back there and then were in that box where we have to get a little desperate or aggressive, if you will, to try and get some points out of it. Yeah, we’re able to look at the results and understand why we were there. We’re not scratching our heads as to why we ran that bad. We know what caused it. Yeah, it is what it is. It stinks, but you get to reset and start over for this round where we were at the beginning.”
Reddick has good reason to be confident. The No. 45 23XI Racing Toyota he's driving has won three of the last five Cup races at Kansas -- with three different drivers! Reddick himself is the defending winner of this playoff race, taking the win with a dramatic three-wide pass at the white flag.
However, he was strangely absent during the spring race this year, qualifying 15th and finishing 20th. But don't expect a repeat of that lackluster showing come Sunday.
“There was a lot of things that happened in the race that contributed to that," explained Reddick. "Specifically for our team, we were very close in practice, qualifying didn’t exactly go perfect. Made some mistakes on my end that put us out of the top 10. But as for the race itself, yeah, I’d say we were decent.
"I think we could’ve ran top five but certainly hitting the wall the way I did to start the race racing the 48 [Alex Bowman] did a lot of damage to our car and from there it spiraled out of control. We ran something over and put a hole in the floor in the car so just a lot of things went wrong to really hurt the performance."
Starting up front
Due to all those factors, Reddick and team "weren't panicked" returning to Kansas this weekend. "The other Toyota’s ran good, and we know where they’re at. And we’ve been very close. We’ve had winning speed and had that potential in year’s past, so we knew that we weren’t going to have to look at a lot of things to improve and change coming back.”
Qualifying proved Reddick's point as two Joe Gibbs Racing Toyotas locked out the front row. Reddick was only one row behind, qualifying fourth.
Much like the first round, the next three races include a drafting track and a road course, adding another level of unpredictability to the playoffs.
“It will be that much more important to have solid races and that’s kind of what our foundation has been the majority of this year," said Reddick about the wildcard aspect of this round. "Yeah, it will be nice to leave here with a win and not have to worry about the next two, but certainly our strengths has been about getting top fives and getting top 10s and scoring lot of points. If we do those things here, it will put us in a position where we’re not overly stressed going into Talladega and then the Roval."
