Tyler Reddick, “waiting to puke,” wins NASCAR’s regular season

Given his shot at the regular season title and the championship-boosting points that come with it, no one would blame Tyler Reddick for heading into last night’s race at Darlington — the season finale — with a pit in his stomach. Only it wasn’t nerves making him feel bad.

“I thought I was going to (puke),” said Reddick, who battled a brutal stomach bug that made an already tense race even more difficult. “I really did at the end of Stage 1, as soon as the yellow came out.”

He went on to explain that his young son, Beau, was feeling sick last weekend at Daytona. Reddick started to develop symptoms at the start of the Darlington race weekend. “Felt good pretty much all the way up until the race. I don’t know, just must have been the bump off of (Turn 2) or something. It just really, really got bad by the end of Stage 1. It just stayed there the rest of the way.

His team, 23XI, did everything it could to keep him from the worst-case scenario while he gutted out 500 miles of driving. Reddick asked for crackers and bread over the radio too soothe his stomach; the team handed him some pills during the stage break — only for the driver to accidentally drop them inside the No. 45 car.

Lesson learned. At the next stop, they handed him a water bottle with crushed pills already dissolved inside.

“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. 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.”

As if driving through nausea wasn’t enough, Reddick and team also spent the night focused on the ever-changing points battle with Kyle Larson. The regular season title may be symbolic, but it comes with an immediate 15-point lead as NASCAR Cup Series enters the playoffs. Five of the last seven drivers to take the regular season title — and those valuable points — have gone on to make the Championship 4. 

“It was tough, man, when we just were bleeding points to the 5 in the middle of the race,” said Reddick. “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…