Tyler Reddick’s Great Summer of Misery carries on

August 9, 2026 Greg Engle NASCAR News Top Story 0


Tyler Reddick’s summer has gone from bad to worse to “surely somebody is making this up.”

Unfortunately for the 23XI Racing driver, nobody is.

Reddick’s latest chapter in the Great Summer of Misery arrived Sunday at Iowa Speedway, where his day lasted roughly long enough for the tires to get warm. Battling Erik Jones for eighth, Reddick got loose entering Turn 1, washed up the track and slammed the nose of his No. 45 Toyota into the outside wall.

Jones, who had entered the Iowa Corn 350 18th in points and 44 markers below the Chase cutline, got caught up in the mess. Neither driver made it any farther, with Reddick credited with 36th and Jones 35th.

For Reddick, it was another brutal blow in what has become a remarkably ugly stretch of the season.

Through the first 17 races, Reddick looked less like a driver and more like a man who had discovered a cheat code. He led the Cup Series standings and won five of the first nine races, at one point building a 129-point advantage over Denny Hamlin following the May race at Watkins Glen International.

Then summer arrived.

And apparently brought a flamethrower.

Reddick had gone 14 consecutive races without finishing worse than 15th while collecting 11 top-10 finishes. Since then, the wheels have very much come off—sometimes literally.

Entering Iowa, he had finished 25th or worse in five of his previous eight races. There were crashes at Michigan and North Wilkesboro, while mechanical problems bit him at Sonoma Raceway and Chicagoland Speedway. Sunday added another DNF to the collection.

The numbers are getting downright strange.

Reddick is now on pace for five finishes of 30th or worse while having just three top-10 finishes over the corresponding stretch. That is a stunning reversal for a driver who looked like a championship favorite only a few months ago.

The points standings have noticed, too.

Hamlin’s lead ballooned to 84 points after Indianapolis two weeks ago, turning what once looked like a Reddick coronation into a rather uncomfortable scramble to make sure he even has a comfortable path into the Chase.

Reddick knows it.

“We needed a few perfect weeks, and it needed to start here today,” he said. “Obviously that didn’t happen.”

No kidding.

Even more frustrating was the fact that Reddick knew exactly where the blame belonged.

“Just got out of shape in an area—corner entry—where I thought we were pretty secure all weekend,” he said. “It is the type of stuff you don’t do to yourself, and you don’t do to a teammate.”

That last part probably stings almost as much as the wreck itself. Reddick didn’t just throw away another finish. He took a fellow Toyota driver with him.

And now, after spending the first part of the season looking like the driver everyone else needed to catch, Reddick suddenly finds himself doing the catching.

The summer of misery continues.

Greg Engle
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