Reddick welcoming the reset as NASCAR heads into its postseason

Tyler Reddick doesn’t believe his 23XI Racing team needs to do anything differently after NASCAR's regular season got away from them following a red-hot start.

“We’re going to be rolling back into tracks where we’ve won and led laps and were extremely fast,” Reddick said this week. “You could say there is a question mark at Gateway and one at Martinsville, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to go in there and be bad. We know we have room to improve.

“When we look at the other track types that we visited for the first time this year, we made good gains at tracks that we weren’t happy with where we had been a year ago, or in previous years. So, all things seem to be going in the right direction at the right time.”

Reddick fell out of contention for the No. 1 seed in the NASCAR Cup Series with a rough summer stretch. In some cases it was about the team not executing a complete race; others involved Reddick being collected in something not of his own doing, as debris flew through his grille or crashes started around him. The team certainly experienced a little bit of everything.

And as they stumbled, Denny Hamlin, Toyota teammate and Reddick’s team co-owner, came on hot with multiple wins and strong consistency. Hamlin ended the top seed while Reddick fell as far back as fourth before ultimately finishing up third as things settled after the regular-season finale at Daytona International Speedway.

The gap is 35 points between Hamlin and Reddick as the postseason begins at Darlington Raceway (Sunday, 5 p.m. ET). Reddick won the spring race at the track.

“Obviously, it would have been great to hang onto the points lead and great to not fight the things we did,” said Reddick. “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. We’re seeded, and we’re going to go now.”

The year started with Reddick looking invincible. Reddick became the first Cup Series driver to win the first three races of the season, and he had five wins by the time the series closed the book on the first 10 races of the year. At times, his point lead ballooned to over 100 or 120 points over the competition.

Through the first 16 races, Reddick had accumulated 12 top-10 finishes, and nine of them were top-five finishes. But then the other side of racing fortune caught up with the group.

“It was almost like a coin; there were two sides to it, really,” said Reddick of his regular season. “We’d be on, or we’d be off, and not necessarily from a base standpoint, but just executing and having clean days versus catastrophic days. So, I’d say if it was all sunshine and roses all year long, you’d feel good about what you do.

“But it is important to have a degree of toughness and understanding of how to deal with losses, failures, or whatever it is, and we’ve been on both sides of it this year. We kind of know what it’s like.”

The regular season ended with Reddick earning three top-10 finishes in the last five races. They weren’t the cleanest of races, and his laps-led production continues to be much lower than the first half of the year (30 laps led in the last 10 races), but perhaps signs of a small swing of momentum. And while Reddick might be on his back foot still, there is no conceding the title fight.

“When you look at having the best year possible, you want to check all the boxes; you want to win a lot of races and not throw races away,” he said.

“But if it was a season-long format, those bad days would really, really sting. Now everything resets to where it is now, and I think we understand how important it is to manage our races, and we understand how tough it can be to be on the other side of it.”