When we last spoke with Tyler Reddick, the timing coincided with the year-ending NASCAR Awards in Charlotte. His first Championship 4 appearance had ended less than two weeks earlier at Phoenix Raceway, resulting in a fourth-place finish in the 2024 Cup Series standings.
At the time, Reddick said he hadn’t spared a moment to reflect on the Phoenix finale or the season that had been. His prime focus was on a host of things that had been added to his offseason list — a honeymoon on the heels of his July wedding, holiday time with family, and home-improvement work after a recent move.
A debrief and a refocus on the 2025 campaign, he said, will come in due time.
“I don’t know if ‘reflect’ is really the word that comes to mind for me,” Reddick said Nov. 22. “I have plenty of good notes to go back through. We all do. I think at some point we’ll review the season as a whole. But yeah, I think at moments I probably have, but not for long periods of time. I’ve just been doing other things outside of racing that’s taking up all my day.”
When that 2024 recap with his 23XI Racing team comes, plenty of positives will be there for review. Reddick won three times during the season, notching his first superspeedway victory (Talladega in April) and adding another win at Michigan in August during a sizzling summer stretch for the No. 45 Toyota group. That hot streak helped him seal the Regular Season Championship by one point over Kyle Larson.
His momentum dissipated once the playoffs began, but the postseason provided Reddick with a defining highlight at Homestead-Miami Speedway. The 28-year-old driver shook off a slight tire disadvantage and bypassed both Denny Hamlin and Ryan Blaney on the final lap for a victory he said, “shouldn’t have worked out and we found a way to overcome the odds.”
That win clinched a Championship 4 spot for Reddick among the title-eligible quartet, alongside Blaney, William Byron and eventual champ Joey Logano. Reddick never quite contended in the season-ending event, placing sixth overall as the last of the four at Phoenix, but he lauded both the team’s ability to bounce back from a subpar practice and his own capabilities when dealing with the postseason stressors.
“From that point, from I’d say the time I’d woke up after winning Homestead, I was in a pretty, pretty good spot mentally, knowing what I needed to do, what to be focused on,” Reddick said. “It felt like a familiar place from the times doing it on the Xfinity side, so yeah, I think I have a good place there. We just know that we’ve got to hopefully find some more speed when we go back (to Phoenix) in the spring, and hopefully it moves us in the right direction for next fall.”
That preparation will come once the rest of his personal list gets in order.
“Working on other things outside of racing, catching up on life, honey-do’s, whatever you want to call them,” Reddick says. “So yeah, once I get all that stuff in a good place, I feel like I’ll be decompressed and ready to get back just focused on racing.”