Tyler Reddick was the most consistent driver across the first 26 races of the NASCAR Cup Series season.
While 2021 Cup Series champion Kyle Larson heads into the NASCAR Playoffs with the most wins (four) and the points lead, it’s Reddick who leads all in top-five (11) and top-10 finishes (18).
The 23XI Racing driver backed up his stout run with the regular season championship after finishing 10th in Sunday night’s Cook Out Southern 500 at Darlington (S.C.) Raceway.
He won the title and 15 bonus points by one marker over Larson. Reddick begins the NASCAR Playoffs in third, 23 points above the cutline.
It wasn’t smooth sailing for Reddick inside the race car, however, as he was ill throughout the 500-mile race.
Despite feeling under the weather, the 28-year-old didn’t have plans of exiting his No. 45 Toyota Camry.
“Someone was going to probably going to have to pull me out of the car,” Reddick laughed. “Hopefully, it didn’t come to that. I don’t know. We had thought about it. Having Corey (Heim) on standby, and 10:30 in the morning came around, and the worst of it was behind me, so I really thought I was going to be OK.
“Leading up to the race, getting in the car was the best that I had felt in days, and just once we got going with that extended period of time with the heat and the bumps off of (turn) two – I think that was a lot of it. It started going a really bad direction during the race.”
Reddick withstood the pressure inside the car and prevailed.
“It took all day Monday and some of yesterday to start feeling better,” Reddick said during playoff media day on Wednesday.
Heading into the playoff opener Sunday at Atlanta Motor Speedway as the regular season champion, Reddick feels there isn’t added pressure, but acknowledged it “just builds naturally” as drivers advance toward the Championship 4 at Phoenix Raceway in November.
“The longer you are in it, the better shot you have, so you kind of have to understand the moment and you have to set-up and perform and execute each weekend,” Reddick said. “This first round presents its challenges, but there are 16 of us – all in this together – if one of us has a bad day, there will probably be three or four of us that will too.
“Hopefully, we can weather the bad days and just not have them – that has been our strong suit – when things happen around us and we miss it. We will just see how it goes.”