LEBANON, Tenn. — Before last weekend‘s Coca-Cola 600, Tyler Reddick stated the No. 45 team needed a reset. Then, he nearly went out and put the full marathon together, only for it to go awry during the final stint.
That‘s the story of Reddick‘s 2025 season just past the one-third mark.
The defending regular-season champion sits fifth in the regular-season championship battle at the halfway point. But digging deeper into the statistics, he‘s not far behind his pace from 2024, and is actually one position higher in the standings. The primary difference is he‘s 17 points further behind the lead this year (minus-107 compared to minus-90 last year).
Coming off a Championship 4 appearance, expectations were naturally higher after scoring 23XI Racing‘s first three-win season.
“The rapid increase in performance that 23XI has had ever since I joined the team, at some point that inevitably is going to taper off some,” Reddick said on Saturday at Nashville Superspeedway. “You never want to get to the point where you‘re going back down the mountain, but the closer you get to the top of that mountain, the harder it gets to continue to find speed. It seems like more now it‘s a matter of finding consistency.”
Consistency, indeed. The No. 45 team is tied with its 23XI teammate Bubba Wallace for the fourth-most stage points in the series, sitting right at the century mark. They trail only William Byron (137), Kyle Larson (128) and Ryan Blaney (110).
The glaring weakness has been the final stage. Reddick has a mere four top-10 finishes, down from seven last year at this time. Since the fourth race of the season at Phoenix Raceway, the No. 45 team has only two finishes better than 14th. Four of the last five races have been 18th or worse at the checkered flag.
Yet Reddick isn‘t concerned with the potential of the No. 45 team. He believes his team should be graded on performance, rather than results.
“It‘s more a matter of what‘s our capability and performance is like,” Reddick added. “Last weekend (at Charlotte), it was really good. We‘ve been a little bit more hit or miss compared to last year. The finishes will come with the more consistent performance.
“At the end of the year, you look back and see the results of every given weekend. For me, it‘s more about the performance that we bring to the race track and that won‘t always be reflected in the finishing results.”
Denny Hamlin, co-owner of 23XI Racing, still thinks the No. 45 team needs a larger sample size from the reset to see an improvement. He was pleased last week.
“It‘s going to take a little time with them,” Hamlin stated. “I like the speed that they‘ve had over the last two weeks. Their race pace at [North] Wilkesboro wasn‘t what I expected; it was about what I expected at Charlotte out of them. Execution is going to be the key with them. I think they have reset and we‘re coming into the weekends now with that reset mind and we‘ll see where they go with it.”
It was about this time last year that the No. 45 soared. Over the final 13 races of the 2024 season, Reddick had 11 top-10 finishes, with seven of those cracking the top five. The high point was winning at Michigan International Speedway, where he enters next weekend‘s event as the defending winner.
Reddick was the fastest driver in Nashville during Saturday‘s practice session on single-lap and 10-lap averages. He qualified fourth for Sunday‘s Cracker Barrel 400 (7 p.m. ET, Prime Video, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), slotting in third of the Toyota drivers.
The California native also had a surprise to share this weekend, announcing Sunday the birth of his second child, Rookie George Reddick.