ELKHART LAKE, Wisc. – “Look where we are, Beau! Wake up! Wake up! Wake Up!”
Alexa De Leon, girlfriend of Tyler Reddick, sat on the bottom step of the podium in Road America’s victory lane. Her 2-and-half-year-old, blonde-headed son, Beau, was cradled in her arms, sleeping like his life depended on it.
A loud PA system intermittently blared to life, narrating the events unfolding just feet away.
The rumble of a NASCAR Cup car’s engine. Champagne bottles being loudly uncorked. The cheers of excited fans.
Every minute or so, a loud “Woo!” went up from a crowd of Richard Childress Racing crew members, as they slowly made their way through the “Hat Dance.”
Beau was oblivious to it all.
De Leon tried to form one of her son’s hands into the universal sign for “No. 1,” and failed.
As another “Woo!” went out, De Leon rocked her son forward in unison with it.
“Daddy won!” said De Leon.
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Tyler Reddick passed Chase Elliott, the Cup Series’ active wins leader on road courses, with 17 laps to go around the longest road course – four miles – in NASCAR.
Seventeen laps. Sixty-eight miles.
That’s how long the crew of the No. 8 Richard Childress Racing team had to wait.
No pressure.
“Seventeen laps at Elkhart Lake, at Road America, is the longest laps in racing,” Andy Petree, RCR’s VP of competition, told Frontstretch, conveying the literal and figurative sense of the distance.
With eight laps to go and Elliott barely under a second behind Reddick, the voice of Reddick’s spotter, Derek Kneeland, keyed up over the radio.
“Out the windshield, do not look in that mirror.”
Reddick couldn’t help himself.
“I was looking at my mirror,” Reddick admitted later. “It hurt me a few times. But more than not it was a positive because I could kind of see where Chase was gaining on me and where I was making gains on him, too. …
“It was great to see once he was getting smaller and smaller that I was starting to do the right things and build that gap.”
After keeping Elliott at a manageable, yet still dangerous distance for 12 laps, the third-year Cup driver began pulling away from the 2020 series champion with five laps to go.
Crew chief Randall Burnett at one point turned to Petree on the No. 8 pit box and said “Only four laps to go.”
Petree responded, “Yeah, but at Martinsville, that’s like 32 laps or whatever.”
There was a lot a member of Reddick’s team or his girlfriend Alexa, could think about in…
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