KANSAS CITY, Kan. — If it’s the NASCAR Cup Series this season, it must be Tyler Reddick.
Reddick, who won four of the first eight races of the campaign, won his third pole of the season during qualifying for Sunday’s AdventHealth 400 at Kansas Speedway.
Reddick turned a best lap of 29.142 seconds at 185.300 mph driving the No. 45 23XI Racing Toyota on the 1.5-mile superspeedway. It was the 14th pole of his career.
Reddick was happy with the run after he struggled at Kansas last year.
“Yeah, I think for us, we came here a year ago, and really struggled all weekend long, and that was a tough pill to swallow, for sure,” Reddick said. “We had felt like this has been kind of our playground for a number of years, and we came here this past spring, we just, I mean, start to finish on the whole weekend, just miss the mark pretty bad. So, when we came back here last fall, it was a huge emphasis for us, obviously, it’s in the playoffs and everything as well, at the time. We wanted to come back here with something better, and we didn’t need a lot of laps with the car that we had, but I felt like it was much more the direction where we needed to be.
“So, I was very happy with that, and we kind of used that as our starting point coming back here, and, yeah, for me, just today was just a car that had great handling, certainly the speed was there as well in the sheet, but very, very comfortable what I had. I feel like we did a good job of building off of last fall, and when you’re able to do that, you can be comfortable, consistent, and run good laps, and then when it comes to qualifying, you have the confidence to put a lap like that down.”
Reddick’s team co-owner Denny Hamlin will share the front row in a Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota.
Last week’s winner, Ty Gibbs, starts third in a second JGR Toyota, while Kyle Larson, who won the spring race at Kansas last year, starts fourth in a Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet.
Chase Briscoe rounded out the top five in another JGR Toyota.
