What Happened?
Tyler Reddick endured a grueling final three overtime restarts to win his first NASCAR Cup Series race in 2023 coming at Circuit of the Americas on March 26. Despite his best efforts, Kyle Busch finished second with Alex Bowman, Ross Chastain and William Byron completing the top five.
This is Reddick’s third road-course win out of his four total Cup Series victories and his first for 23XI Racing.
But What Really Happened?
Just forget about those last 10 laps for a minute. We were having a good time.
With no stage breaks scheduled for a NASCAR Cup Series points race since 2016, we got to see crew chiefs and race teams play out some interesting and varied pit strategies on a road course for the first time in what feels like forever. It was something most of these long behemoth circuits need desperately.
And that was such a breath of fresh air, wasn’t it?
Stage breaks made strategies far more simplified as it allowed crew chiefs to plan their racing gameplays around those two scheduled yellow flags. However, with them removed from the equation, it allowed teams to play around a little with fuel and tire strategies.
As eventual race winner Reddick opted to race on the three-stop strategy opting for fresher tires and faster pace, race rival Byron was going the two-stop route hoping that track position would have ahead of the No. 45 at the end.
And for a great majority of the first 40 or so laps, nobody really had an answer as to whose strategy would play out best.
Really, it felt like watching a Formula 1 race.
How fitting too, as NASCAR decided to lift that stage break barrier on a racetrack that was made for F1 cars in a race that featured two F1 World Champions and had Drive to Survive star and Haas F1 Team Principal Guenther Steiner in the FOX Sports booth commentating alongside.
With Steiner, Jenson Button, Kimi Raikkonen and COTA itself being among the stories of the day, Sunday was a great chance for NASCAR to draw in some of those F1 fans that they’ve been missing out on the last couple of years.
However, for a race that likely had a number of those fans watching NASCAR for the first time, those final four cautions…
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