There’s tenacity… and then there’s the Tyler Reddick version of it, which appears to involve bouncing off a concrete wall, briefly running out of fuel, and still showing up in victory lane as if nothing particularly unusual has happened.
Because on Sunday at Kansas Speedway, not even physics—or at least a reasonable interpretation of it—could stop him.
Reddick clawed his way to his fifth win of 2026 in an overtime finish that turned a relatively civilized, high-speed chess match into a bar fight with carbon fiber. He muscled past Kyle Larson in the final corners, winning by a scant .118 of a second in a race that, for most of its life, looked like it would be settled with a polite handshake and a points tally.
Instead, it ended in chaos.
Much of the afternoon had been a strategic duel, with the only cautions coming at the stage breaks. Denny Hamlin controlled large portions of the race—winning Stage 1 and leading the most laps—and with 30 to go, it looked like he had things comfortably in hand.
But Reddick and his team did something clever. They pitted a bit later on the final round of stops. Not wildly late, not “we’ve lost the plot” late—but just enough to give themselves fresher tires and a fighting chance. And slowly, methodically, Reddick began to reel Hamlin in.
He took the lead with nine laps remaining.
Then it all unraveled.
With three laps to go, Reddick’s Toyota coughed, sputtered, and briefly gave up on the whole idea of forward motion. He radioed that he was out of fuel and smacked the wall in Turn 3, handing the lead right back to Hamlin. It looked done. Over. Finished.
Except NASCAR races, like action movies, have a habit of ignoring the obvious ending.
Cody Ware spun just ahead of the leaders, bringing out a caution and setting up an overtime restart that flipped the script entirely. The leaders dove to pit road, most opting for two tires. Hamlin won the race off pit road, Reddick tucked in behind, and suddenly we had ourselves a three-wide scramble into Turn 1 that looked less like racing and more like an argument.
By Turn 2, Reddick and Larson had broken free, with Christopher Bell lurking and everyone else trying to keep their fenders attached.
Larson grabbed the lead, and for a moment, it looked like he might escape.
He didn’t.
On the final lap, Reddick hunted him down, got the run, and powered past coming out of Turn 4, because apparently bouncing off walls is now part of his race-winning checklist.
Behind them, Chase Briscoe, the only one in the mix who had taken four tires, came home third, with Hamlin fading to fourth and Bubba Wallace rounding out the top five.
Afterward, even Reddick sounded like a man who’d just watched it all unfold rather than actually driven it.
“Just really blessed with the late caution. Was that nuts or what? I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “Man, these late race restarts get crazy. I obviously had a run on the 5. I was shocked I was able to get to his inside there.”
He didn’t sugarcoat the chaos either.
“I never like being on the inside of it. Really hate that for Christopher Bell… Not thrilled I got Christopher there. I hate that for him because he was having a good, solid day.”
And as for the call that ultimately put him in position to win?
“Great call by Billy to put two tires on… We were three-wide and just all ran out of room.”
Larson, meanwhile, was left doing that very particular kind of post-race analysis that translates roughly to “it was perfect… until it wasn’t.”
“It was a good execution on the restart there at the end,” Larson said. “I got to the lead and I thought I could cruise right there to the checkered flag, but my balance on two tires was just super, super tight. I didn’t get through three and four fast enough… That was a bummer, but just overall happy with the day we had.”
Up front, it might have looked like chaos. Underneath it, though, it was precision—strategy calls, tire gambles, and timing so fine it bordered on absurd.
And the result?
Reddick becomes the first driver since Dale Earnhardt in 1987 to win five of the first nine races of a season. Which is the sort of statistic that doesn’t just raise eyebrows—it starts whispering about something bigger.
Next stop: Talladega Superspeedway, where order goes to die and chaos is less a possibility and more a contractual obligation.
Which, based on Sunday, should suit Reddick just fine.
Greg was a writer for DriveTribe supporting Amazon's The Grand Tour and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, and a Masters degree in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek and a regular contributor to Forbes.
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