Reddick Overcomes ‘Flu Race’ For Regular Season Title

Tyler Reddick won the NASCAR Cup Series regular-season championship Sunday. (Lesley Ann Miller/LAT for Toyota Racing photo)

DARLINGTON, S.C. – In 1997, Michael Jordan miraculously dropped 38 points in Game 5 of the NBA Finals, leading the Chicago Bulls to break a series tie with the Utah Jazz in a thriller memorialized as the “Flu Game.”

Nearly three decades removed from the six-time NBA champion’s gutsy performance through food poisoning, the now co-owner of 23XI Racing bore witness to an equally impressive display, as his driver Tyler Reddick powered through a stomach-bug during Sunday night’s Cook Out Southern 500 en route to the NASCAR Cup Series regular-season title.

Entering one of the sport’s crown jewel events, Reddick held a 17-point lead over former Cup Series champion Kyle Larson in the driver standings. While the 28-year-old had a decent points buffer ahead of his fellow California-born competitor, he also strapped into his No. 45 Toyota Camry XSE at a major disadvantage.

After the penultimate regular-season race at Daytona (Fla.) Int’l Speedway, Reddick recounted having to take his son to the infield care center with a nasty illness.

It was a harbinger of things to come. The day before practice and qualifying at Darlington (S.C.) Raceway, Reddick woke up feeling under the weather, and his symptoms worsened over the next two days until race time.

Rolling off sixth, Reddick fought the urge to vomit – among other things – for 367 laps and 500 miles in one of the most grueling events on the circuit. But the No. 45 crew kept their driver’s head in the game with various in-race medicinal remedies, administered by water bottles throughout the evening, resulting in a series-best 18th top-10 finish of the season.

Add in the regular-season title that came with it, and it made for one of the more impressive performances of the entire Cup Series season thus far.

“That pretty much tops it,” Reddick said after the race. “That's the worst I've felt … [I] felt good pretty much all the way up until the race … It just really got bad by the end of stage one (and) just stayed there the rest of the way. Just really thankful (for) a lot of great people on our team. They were feeding me the right stuff in the car to help me manage it best as I could.

“At one point, I was just waiting to puke all over myself. Thankfully they kept that from happening,” Reddick added. “A whole lot of other gross stuff. We were able to avoid a lot of that, which was nice, but it was extremely uncomfortable in the car all night.”

With the odds stacked against him, Reddick remained in the fight at one his best tracks – a place he’d finished runner-up twice before entering Sunday night.

Tyler Reddick in action at Darlington (S.C.) Raceway. (Danny Hansen/NKP for Toyota Racing photo)

Reddick’s biggest issue? Larson, the reigning Southern 500 winner and his competition for the regular-season title, also rivaled him as one of the best at the 1.366-mile facility.

As he battled illness, Reddick only led one lap at Darlington and amassed 10 stage points, while Larson put on a masterclass by sweeping both segments and pacing the field for 72 percent of the race (263 laps). As dominant as Larson was, however, he eventually had to settle for a fourth-place finish.

It wound up being another fellow dirt racer in Chase Briscoe who executed a walk-off win, courtesy of an epic three-car, fourth-to-first pass for the lead with 25 to go.

Once snagging the point position, the driver of the No. 14 Ford Mustang Dark Horse for Stewart-Haas Racing never relinquished it, even through one more set of pit stops and an additional restart.

With their chances at the regular-season crown seemingly dwindling, Reddick and crew chief Billy Scott elected to come to pit road ahead of that final restart for a fresh set of tires, in hopes that the speed differential would be enough to propel Reddick back forward in time.

The gamble paid off, as Reddick’s 10th-place finish was enough to eke out his and 23XI Racing’s first regular-season championship by a single point over Larson in the end.

“We started off the race in stage one, just thought, ‘All right, we get into these green-flag cycles (and) I'll have a shot to get to the lead,’” Reddick said. “That's when things started to spiral out of control. The car was really, really strong right from the get-go. It was tough, man, when we just were bleeding points to (Larson) in the middle of the race, I was trying to think of what I needed to do to go faster. It was really, really hard to focus on that stuff. I was just not able to really do what I normally do [well] here in the car. I don't know, I was just kind of driving with one hand, almost.”

Through all the adversity, Reddick’s effort to earn the regular-season title gave him the 15 bonus playoff points that came with it, an important reward after a banner first two-thirds of the year.

In 26 starts, Larson topped the series in wins with four, poles with five and laps led with nearly 1,100, but Reddick owned every other major statistical category. His 11 top fives, 18 top 10s, and average finish of 11.2 were best among the Cup Series regulars.

All the talks about championship favorites have revolved heavily around Larson and Denny Hamlin to this point, but Reddick has effectively injected himself into the conversation as a legitimate contender for his first-ever premier series title.

Having won back-to-back championships in the NASCAR Xfinity Series in 2018 and ’19 before entering the Cup ranks, Reddick knows exactly what it takes under the pressure of the playoffs to get the job done. Entering the postseason as the No. 3 seed, Reddick has a 23-point advantage over the cutoff heading into Atlanta (Ga.) Motor Speedway.

“It's just a testament to all the hard work that everyone at 23XI, here at the racetrack, week in and week out, back at Airspeed, puts into this,” Reddick said of his team’s regular-season success. “We're on year four of their goals, right? It's just been really, really fun the last two years to be a part of this process, building up to where we want to be.

“I mean, it takes a lot of hard work to be consistent as we've been through the summer stretch … It’s nice to be able to get to where we did in the middle of the year and start thinking about points. I think it really helped us just continue to be more consistent (and) get us in the right mindset for these playoffs, just managing risk versus reward.

“We’ll be doing it three races at a time here soon.”

Reddick will kick off his pursuit of the Cup Series championship during the playoff-opening Quaker State 400 delivered by Walmart, with live coverage set for Sunday, Sept. 8 at 3 p.m. ET on USA, the Performance Racing Network, and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, channel 90.