By David Morgan, Associate Editor
Lady Luck giveth and Lady Luck taketh away.
NASCAR Cup Series regular season champion Tyler Reddick looked as if he was in Lady Luck’s good graces early in Sunday’s South Point 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway after pocketing a stage win in the first stage of the race.
However, just as luck can change on a dime in a Las Vegas casino, the same happened for the driver of the No. 45 23XI Racing Toyota in the second stage when he found himself pinned on the outside in a three-wide battle off Turn 4 on Lap 90 when disaster struck.
With Reddick coming around the outside with a head of steam, Martin Truex, Jr. washed up into Chase Elliott, who then made contact with Reddick, pushing him into the outside wall. Reddick then spun back across the track and made contact with Brad Keselowski, who was an unsuspecting victim of the entire incident before skidding through the infield grass.
As Reddick took his trip through the grass, his car reached a portion of the quarter-mile oval that runs between pit road and the frontstretch and the transition between the grass and asphalt would get Reddick’s car up into the air, where it did a barrel roll over and back onto its wheels.
Through Reddick was able to drive his battered Camry back to pit road in short order, the damage to his machine was too much to fix and his day was done, leading to a 35th place finish.
As a result, Reddick drops from 10 points over the cut off line to start the day to -30 when the checkered flag flew, putting him behind the eight-ball to start the semi-final round of the Playoffs.
He’ll have work to do next week at Homestead and the following week at Martinsville if he is to be one of the four drivers fighting for the championship at Phoenix to close out the season.
“You just have to be aggressive on restarts. It’s how the Next Gen racing has been from the beginning. I kind of saw them both have a moment, and I just had to split second make a decision,” said Reddick.
“You have to be aggressive on the restart. It is hard to pass after a while. Being myself on a mile and a half, being aggressive – by the time I realized I was in trouble, the 19 (Martin Truex Jr.) started sliding and the 9 (Chase Elliott) was coming up and I was pretty much already on their outside at that point, with nowhere to really go.
“I needed to make the decision earlier when I saw them sliding to be more conservative to avoid an…
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