Tyler Reddick beats NASCAR's top road racer at Road America for his first NASCAR Cup victory
ELKHART LAKE – Tyler Reddick didn’t just pick up his first NASCAR Cup Series victory Sunday. He made a statement.
In the final stint of a race Chase Elliott had dominated – and that he had won a year earlier – Reddick hounded Elliott, pounced on a rare mistake and won the Kwik Trip 250 at Road America, a track where he had once questioned his racing future.
The 26-year-old Californian, who cut his teeth in open-wheel short-track racing, finished 3.304 seconds ahead of Elliott, the 2020 Cup champion and the most successful road racer in modern NASCAR.
“I definitely knew he was fast, but we could stay with him on the long run, which told me if we cycled through that last pit sequence, we’d be close or get around him, we’d have a great shot,” Reddick said in his USA Network television interview. “Didn't quite get around him. We were within reach. Thankfully just waited for the right opportunity and was able to take advantage of it in Turn 6.”
Reddick became the series’ fifth first-time winner this season and the 13th driver to win through 18 races. He also pushed to 16 the streak of races in NASCAR’s top two divisions without a repeat winner.
A two-time champion and 10-time winner in the Xfinity Series, Reddick needed 92 starts to score his first Cup victory in his third full season with Richard Childress Racing. He had finished second five times.
Reddick’s best finish in three Xfinity starts at Road America was third in 2019. Only a year earlier he had suffered through a miserable weekend at the track, when he crashed in practice, was generally slow and wondered whether he could cut it at this level.
Reddick finished eighth last year in the return of NASCAR’s top division to Road America after 65 years.
Elliott dominated the first two-thirds of the race from the pole and led 36 of the 62 laps, giving up the top spot only in the pit stop cycles. But after he and Reddick left the pits with 19 laps to go in the 62-lap race, Reddick was as close as he’d been.
When Elliott missed Turn 5 three laps later, Reddick pounced to the inside. They stayed side by side to Turn 6, another lefthander, when Reddick got clear. It took several laps for others to make their final scheduled pit stop, but Reddick took the lead from Harrison Burton on the 47th lap, just before Burton pitted.
Elliott – who has scored seven of his 15 Cup wins on road courses – shadowed Reddick for 10 laps but then drifted back.
“I thought he was going to run me back down,” Reddick said. “I started to make some mistakes (and then) started to take care of the brakes. Apparently I didn't need to. Yeah, very good shape there. What a day.”
Kyle Larson finished third, 21 seconds back followed by Ross Chastain and Daniel Suarez as Chevrolet swept the top five spots. Chastain and Suarez are also among the first-time winners this season.
Josh Bilicki of Richfield, the only Wisconsin driver in the field, finished 36th, 10 laps down after his team was forced to change a leaking power steering pump.
Elliott nearly got another chance at the end thanks to one of Reddick’s teammates. Austin Dillon had a brake failure in Turn 3 with two laps to go, but he got to the Turn 5 runoff area without dropping significant debris that would have brought out a caution flag.
“As far as being nervous at the end of the race, four or five laps to go, I said, we just don't need a caution,” said team owner Richard Childress, who is Dillon’s grandfather. “Then with two to go I guess it was, the 3 (car) blew a left front rotor … and I said, here we go again, here's that caution. But he was able to get off and go straight and saved the day for us.”
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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Tyler Reddick wins at Road America for first NASCAR Cup victory
