For the first time during the 2026 NASCAR Cup season, Tyler Reddick is not the championship leader. After winning the first three races of the year, Reddick held the top spot through the first 17 rounds of the season. At one point, he had a mighty 129-point lead. Just one month later, it’s gone.
Reddick has finished 25th or worse in three of the last four races, and at Sonoma, a power steering issue left him with a last-place finish.
As a result, Denny Hamlin now leads the championship standings, just one point ahead of Reddick. However, the driver of the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota wasn’t smiling after Sunday’s race.
He gave up stage points in favor of flipping both stages, as he had a chance for a top five, or at least top ten finish. But in the end, he finished 26th, leaving a lot of points on the table. On a late-race restart, he got turned around while running seventh fell to the very rear of the field. Hamlin’s splitter was also damaged in the incident, and he struggled to make up lost ground.
“I had a really fast car, top five car on speed,” said Hamlin, subdued in his TNT interview. “Didn’t really have great restarts, giving up a couple in the first and about one after that. Got spun there, and once we got spun, I hit the nose and knocked the splitter off. Lost a lot of downforce, and struggled to run where we were at.”
Reddick tries to look at the positives
As for Reddick, the frustration was clear for him as well. He fell six laps down while the 23XI Racing worked on the power steering issue, and witn so little attrition, he was stuck in last-place for most of the race. He did manage to secure the fastest lap bonus, walking away with a measly two points on the board.
“We were trying to diagnose it, and it was just a very odd issue,” remarked Reddick. “For us … everything seemed fine when we left in the pit stall that first green flag cycle. Just a lot of issues in the steering, just really notchy with the power steering going in and out, like it was getting bound up. I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know if we had a wheel issue or what was going on at first. But all the wheels were good, and it was just really hard to make any kind of laptime with it. It’s so hard to say in hindsight if we made the right decision to work on it. I definitely don’t think I would have been within seconds of the pace, so either way, we had a difficult road ahead. We did get the Xfinity fastest lap out of the day at least (after working on it), so that was the tough thing … It was kind of bittersweet that we were able to get the fastest lap and have that kind of speed, even though we were having slight steering issues.”
On losing control of the championship, Reddick tried to look on the bright side of things. “I’d say we got pretty fortunate today. He was running really good, but something happened, don’t really know what it was. All things considered for the issues that we had, we were really fortunate to really only lose nine points on the day to Denny, finishing dead last. It is what it is, we’ll take it and move on. And we’ll do everything we can at Chicagoland to get back the lead.”
Watch: Reddick on ‘very odd issue’ that resulted in last-place finish
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