Reddick acknowledges his superb start to the season won't be rewarded with a title

Tyler Reddick will not have the NASCAR Cup Series championship trophy to go along with an incredible start to the 2026 season.

An eighth place finish in Sunday’s race at Charlotte Motor Speedway closed the door for Reddick, who lost eight more points and fell to 114 points behind the championship leader Kyle Larson.

“Yeah, we’re a little too far back,” Reddick told RACER. “We’re just going to try and win a couple of races and get our program going back in the right direction.”

The season started with Reddick the man to beat. 23XI Racing won the first three races as Reddick triumphed at the Daytona 500, then at EchoPark Speedway and Circuit of the Americas. Reddick became the first driver in NASCAR history to win the first three Cup Series races in a season.

By the time the series was through its first 10 races, Reddick looked untouchable. He had five wins, with his worst finish being 15th. Reddick led Denny Hamlin by 110 points.

The numbers tell the tale when splitting Reddick’s season in half.

· Average finish in the first 16 races = 7.18

· Top 10 finishes = 12

· Laps led = 419

The first 16 races covered the Daytona 500 through Pocono Raceway.

· Average finish in the last 16 races = 16.93

· Top 10 finishes = 7

· Laps led = 105

Reddick lost the points lead after finishing 36th at Sonoma Raceway (the 18th race of the season). It came during a stretch of the summer when Hamlin was on an impressive run, including three straight wins and outscoring Reddick nearly every week.

The trouble for Reddick’s No. 45 team has not been limited to one area. Reddick began getting caught up in trouble not of his own making, which he had largely avoided in the first half of the season; the team also mishandled race cars and failed to execute in races. He never regained the point lead and finished third in the regular-season standings.

In the Chase, Reddick has lost points to the leader in all but two races:

· 24 points behind after Darlington (having started the Chase 35 with the reset)

· 41 points behind after St. Louis

· 61 points behind after Bristol

· 111 points behind after Kansas

· 106 points behind after Las Vegas

· 114 points behind after Charlotte

A top-10 finish at Charlotte didn't come without a day-long battle with his race car. Reddick muscled his car for much of the afternoon, with multiple shots of him getting out of shape or hitting the wall.

“I thought it was really good, but we had that first restart there where we lined up, I think it was sixth, and took off plowing tight up the track,” Reddick said. “Ty [Gibbs] and I hit the wall, and I don’t know if I did some damage to it then. The following restart, I tagged the wall pretty hard with the right rear off (Turn) 4. So yeah, I don’t know if we have a damaged race car or not. It’s kind of hard to diagnose – the steering didn’t seem off.

“But I thought we had race-winning speed the first run, and we just hit a lot of stuff in a very short amount of time. I don’t know if the track went away from where we needed it to be or if it was just incidents along the way.”