Understandably, Tyler Reddick has been the most subdued of the Championship 4 drivers this week.
For one thing, he’s the only one of the four making his first run as a title-eligible driver in the NASCAR Cup Series Championship Race (3 p.m. ET Sunday on NBC, MRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
For another, Reddick was 21st fastest in Friday’s final Cup Series practice, trailing Championship 4 rivals Ryan Blaney (first), William Byron (fourth) and Joey Logano (ninth).
“Yeah, I think we went the wrong way,” Reddick acknowledged. “We were able to understand it and learn from it. You never want to go through a practice and have it go that way, but we understood why we got where we did and why the speed kind of went away.”
Reddick’s 23XI Racing team made adjustments after the practice session and apparently found a productive direction. Reddick made the final round of time trials on Saturday and earned the 10th starting position for the main event.
The only disappointment for Reddick was qualifying behind eighth-place starter William Byron. With second-fastest qualifier Joey Logano penalized for inspection issues, Byron gets first pick of pit stalls, with the obvious choice being stall No. 1 at the exit from pit road.
The advantage of that pit box may be mitigated by the moving of the camera (timing) line 74 feet farther from the exit from the box.
“There’s a lot of racing left to be had, right?” Reddick said. “Today was an important step in that. Obviously, we wanted to out-qualify the 24 (Byron) to get the best pit stall. Arguably, who knows if one is as big of an advantage as it is in years past with the camera moving, but yeah, just trying to stay focused on all that.
“Obviously, I was hoping I was going to hang on and beat the 24. So, I mean, there’s just a little bit of that. We have the rest of the day today to kind of unwind and re-center and get ready to go for Sunday.”
-NASCAR Wire
