Reddick’s No. 45 23XI Racing Toyota clearly had the speed in Sunday’s NASCAR Cup race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway to keep up with eventual winner Kyle Larson but hobbled with issues on pit road, a lack of track position made his chase of the leader much more difficult.
The conclusion of the first two stages as well as the end of the race all came down to Reddick trying to run down Larson for the lead. Each time, Larson came out on top.
The final time came with Larson leading on a restart with 27 of 267 laps remaining and six laps later Reddick had made his way into the runner-up spot.
Over the next 21 laps, Reddick was able to cut a 2-plus-second lead to a few car lengths, but he ran out of time as Larson clinched the win.
“Yeah, Kyle did a really good job there taking away pretty much every option I had there to close the gap,” Reddick said after the race. “He seemed pretty good in the middle (lane) and I was obviously really good on the bottom, and he just never let me have it, right?
“I kept trying to run higher and higher and you know, he’s kind of running in the middle of the race track, which is pretty efficient to block both lanes. Every time I sort of got close, I mean, we’re running just wide open enough in (Turns) 1 and 2, you can kind of defend pretty well.
“It’s frustrating.”
Reddick said he felt as the race went on, it was more and more difficult to make up lost track position.
“You have to run up front all day long, and when asked about what we need to do to get better, that’s the very thing, and we didn’t do it today,” he said.
Reddick felt some hiccups on pit road – including once when he slid through his pit box and had to back up – prevented him from taking full advantage of the fast car he had.
“I feel like we were never up front really all day long, until it got to the stage ends. We had a really good (car),” he said. “Just stupid mistakes on pit road. Same shit, different year, right?
“Kind of frustrating. We’ll continue to work on it, but a good rebound for our team today.”
It has been a tough beginning to the 2024 season for Reddick, who was involved in wrecks in both the season-opener at Daytona and last weekend at Atlanta.
At Las Vegas, Reddick showed his potential this season but coming so close to a victory that could erase the rough start to the year was hard to take.
“We were pretty evenly matched, so I don’t know if there was anything that I really could’ve done to get around him,” Reddick said. “He would have had to make a big mistake or had some traffic kind of knock his wind around.
“It’s a solid effort for our team, that’s how we need to run, but I don’t like running second.”
