Tyler Reddick screwed up on the final lap of Sunday’s race in Chicago and lost his chance to fight for victory.
Reddick was closing in on race leader Alex Bowman when he hit the Turn 5 wall with his right front end. He then came out of the corner and clipped the wall with the left side of his 23XI Racing Toyota Camry. The errors allowed Bowman to extend the lead while Reddick faded.
“I’m upset,” Reddick said of the second-place finish. “I was catching Alex by a wide margin there. I don’t know, it baffles me. I clearly made a mistake trying to stay in the dry groove, and I had more than enough room in the dry groove. I cut the wheel a little bit too hard, I guess I wasn’t focused enough.
“I knew I was going to catch him and the sooner I did, the better chance I had. It was going to get a little bit more complicated after Turn 8. Unfortunately, we didn’t even give ourselves the chance to compete with him. I hate it. That’s not what this Jordan Brand Toyota Camry is about and that’s not what this team is about. We just need to start taking advantage of these (races).”
Reddick was 1.9 seconds behind Bowman when the white flag came out. He was 1.4 seconds behind Bowman when he hit the Turn 5 wall.
“I had a chance to catch him,” Reddick said. “Obviously I couldn’t get the job done. All I had to do was put in a clean lap and I couldn’t even do that.”
Reddick had to make a late push and moved into second in the final minutes of the race. Reddick was running 10th when timed racing resumed for the final time with less than five minutes on the clock, but he was on slicks after the No. 45 team decided to run the dry set of tires before the end of the second stage. The track was drying out enough that Reddick and crew chief Billy Scott thought it would be the right call.
“We were expecting the pace gap to be very close, and that’s how it played out,” said Scott. “It all depended on how many people stayed on the wet tyres and how much of a gap they could open up to the guys on slicks to try and get past.”
Reddick gained several positions as the clock ticked down to under three minutes when Joe Gibbs Racing teammates Martin Truex Jr. and Christopher Bell made contact in Turn 2. The field made up ground by using slicks to their advantage while Bowman remained on rain tires.
“In the last 10 laps, there was a lot of movement,” Reddick said. “The 20 (Bell) and the 54 (Gibbs) were obviously ahead of us most of the day and the situation developed in such a way that they ended up getting caught up in other people’s nonsense. We were in position to catch the 48 (Bowman), it was going to be really close, and if I hadn’t made the mistake, it would be crazy.
“I ran all day and I know where my limits are and here at the end, when it matters most, I made the dumbest mistake.”
Before the mistakes, Scott said, “Based on the numbers, we had time (to get there).”
