- Tyler Reddick won three of NASCAR’s first nine 2026 Cup races, including the Daytona 500, then went three straight weeks without a top-10 finish and fell to seventh in the standings.
- Reddick signed with 23XI Racing, the team Denny Hamlin and Michael Jordan built from scratch, after Richard Childress Racing released him a year early from his contract.
- He trails points leader Kyle Larson by 111 with two intermediate-track races left before the next playoff cutoff, and he says the No. 45 team has “big problems” to solve fast.
A Driver Who Led Every Week Suddenly Can’t Find the Front
“We got big problems.” Tyler Reddick said it plainly to reporters outside his hauler, not as a throwaway line but as the shortest, truest sentence he had for a season that flipped on him in a matter of weeks. Reddick led the Cup Series points standings after every one of the first 17 races this year. He won the Daytona 500. He became the first driver in NASCAR history to win the circuit’s first three races of a season. Then the bottom fell out, and the same driver who spent the spring looking unbeatable spent early October explaining, race after race, why his car couldn’t hang on to a top-10 finish.
Reddick now sits seventh in the Chase standings, 111 points behind Kyle Larson, who gained 50 of those points on him in a single afternoon at Kansas. “It is still possible, but we’ve got to run extraordinary and have things go our way, too,” Reddick said of his title chances. It is a strange thing to hear from a driver who, five months earlier, was being talked about as the best in the garage, a driver whose own crew chief had started fielding questions about whether this was simply the best Cup season anybody had put together in a generation.
That gap between where Reddick started 2026 and where he sits now is the part NASCAR fans keep circling back to. Drivers slump. Cars lose their setup window. What’s rarer is watching a driver lead a point standings table for seventeen straight weeks and then spend the next four months looking like a completely different team, one that can’t find the back half of the setup sheet that made it so dominant in February and March.
From a Released Contract to NASCAR’s Most Talked-About Team
Reddick’s path to the No. 45 Toyota started with a team that didn’t want to wait. Hamlin went after Reddick in 2022 while Reddick still drove for Richard Childress Racing, calling him exactly the kind of talent a new organization needed. “Franchise drivers don’t come around that often,” Hamlin said at the time. “And so if there’s ever one that you feel like you can grab, you go after it.” The original plan had Reddick joining 23XI in 2024. Childress released him a year early instead, and Reddick arrived at the fledgling team, co-owned by Hamlin and Michael Jordan, in 2023, taking over the car that had carried Kurt Busch.
That gamble paid off fast. Reddick brought a resume that already included two Xfinity Series championships, in 2018 with JR Motorsports and 2019 with Childress, plus three Craftsman Truck Series wins. At 23XI, he found his footing immediately, winning the 2024 regular-season championship and piling up Cup wins in four of the past five seasons. He went winless in 2025, a quiet year that made what followed in 2026 look almost impossible.
A Start No One Had Matched in Nearly Forty Years
Reddick opened 2026 by winning the season’s first three Cup races, a feat no other driver in NASCAR history had managed. He kept going from there, taking five of the first nine races and becoming only the fourth driver ever to do that this early in a season. The last one to pull it off was Dale Earnhardt, in 1987. He added the Daytona 500 to a resume that now reads like a career year compressed into a single spring, and on March 22 at Darlington he crossed 2,000 career laps led in Cup competition. For a stretch, Reddick wasn’t just winning. He was rewriting what a strong start to a Cup season looked like.
The Slump That Started Quietly and Never Stopped
Crew chief Billy Scott and the No. 45 team can point to a specific starting line for the slide: Michigan International Speedway in early June. Nothing dramatic happened there. The car simply stopped running up front, and it hasn’t found that same pace in the four months that followed. At Kansas, rain washed out practice, leaving the team to guess at a setup. They guessed wrong. Reddick fell from 15th to 34th early in the race on a car with a tight balance that never loosened up, clawed back to fifth, then lost a chunk of that work to a late pit-road error and finished 11th. He didn’t dress it up afterward. “I mean, running 11th on an intermediate race track isn’t really anything we should be proud of,” he said.
The car has kept finding new ways to hurt him. In practice at Las Vegas, Reddick posted the fastest 15-lap and 20-lap average speeds in the field, then stopped on track with a flat left-rear tire before he ever got to prove it on race day. Three straight finishes outside the top 10 is a modest run by most measures. For a driver who spent 17 weeks on top of the standings, it reads like a crisis.
The Jordan Name Doesn’t Make the Losses Easier
Reddick’s slump is unfolding inside a team that carries more outside attention than most of the garage. Michael Jordan became the first Black team owner to win NASCAR’s biggest race when Reddick took the Daytona 500, a milestone that followed Jordan and Hamlin’s co-ownership through years of building 23XI from a startup into a team capable of fielding a championship-caliber car. That history raised the bar for what this season was supposed to be, and it has made the past three months harder to explain away. Inside the shop, the conversations have not been soft. Reddick said this week’s meetings were difficult ones, built around a simple complaint: the team is not happy with how its cars have handled on the tracks that make up most of the fall schedule, and it is trying to avoid repeating the exact setup mistakes that cost it at Kansas.
Jordan rarely speaks publicly about the day-to-day mechanics of the team he co-owns, and he hasn’t commented on Reddick’s slide specifically. But the team he and Hamlin built from a two-car startup into a Daytona 500-winning operation carries an identity bigger than any single losing streak, and that identity is part of what makes a three-race skid feel louder than it would at a smaller shop. Reddick signed a multiyear extension to stay at 23XI back in April, locking himself into exactly this kind of pressure for years to come rather than just one difficult fall.
Two Chances Left to Change the Story
Reddick starts fifth in the South Point 400 at Las Vegas, the next race on a schedule that gives him back-to-back intermediate tracks, the exact surface where his car ran fastest in practice before the flat tire cost him a shot at proving it. He calls those two races his best remaining chance to cut into Larson’s lead rather than simply hold ground. “We got big problems,” he said, and then kept talking anyway. Quitting on a season that started with three straight wins was never going to be the answer for him. Whether a team built to win the sport’s biggest race in February can also win it in November is the question Reddick now has only a handful of weekends left to answer.
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