Tyler Reddick’s Strong Phoenix Performance Not Enough for NASCAR Four-Peat

Phoenix Raceway (Avondale, Ariz.) — The first one was career-changing, two in a row was incredible, three-straight was historic, but winning four consecutive races to start the NASCAR Cup Series season was a long shot for Tyler Reddick. And the No. 45 23XI Racing Toyota driver ultimately finished eighth in Sunday’s Straight Talk Wireless 500. Team Penske’s Ryan Blaney took the checkered flag and snapped Reddick’s three-race win streak, which began with the season-opening Daytona 500, followed by the Autotrader 400 at Echo Park Speedway (Atlanta) and the DuraMAX Texas Grand Prix at Circuit of The Americas last weekend. “We fought through it,” Reddick told us on pit road afterward. “We didn’t have the fastest car, for sure.” The fastest car in qualifying at Phoenix was Joey Logano’s No. 22 Team Penske Ford, but he made it through 253 laps of 312 before crashing. Christopher Bell drove the most dominant Sunday with his No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota leading a race-high 176 laps before finishing fourth. Reddick — still the leader atop the Cup Series standings through four races — qualified eighth and finished in eighth, but his average running position was between fifth and sixth. Phoenix also was the first race of the season in which he didn’t lead any laps. [DESERT DOUBLE: 4 Takeaways From Josef Newgarden’s INDYCAR Win at Phoenix] “We wanted to finish in the top five, but we scored a good amount of points all day long,” the No. 45 Toyota driver said. “When we’re just off a little bit, these are the kind of days we need to have.” Despite not extending his win streak to four season-opening races, Reddick and his 23XI team still earned the fourth-most points (39) on the day behind Blaney (65), Bell (54) and 23XI co-owner Denny Hamlin (47). Fellow 23XI driver Bubba Wallace earned the fifth-most points (37) and finished sixth, but with the win, Blaney passed Wallace for second in the Cup standings. “I thought we did a pretty good job of [getting points],” Reddick told us. “I don’t know — we may have been a fourth- or fifth-place car when you look at the whole day in general.” On his final pit stop, the team opted to change out two of Reddick’s tires instead of four, which would have taken longer and likely would have dropped him further back in the field. “Honestly, we were kind of stuck in that spot where taking four tires would have been really tough to drive back through,” Reddick added. “So we did about all we could.”