It wasn’t all that long ago Tyler Reddick looked like the kind of championship leader who makes everyone else start browsing Zillow for next season.
Five wins in the opening five races. A points lead so large it felt less like a standings gap and more like a constitutional monarchy.
Then Denny Hamlin happened.
Reddick left Pocono with a second-place finish Sunday, which on paper sounds excellent. Except in the strange and cruel mathematics of NASCAR, second place can sometimes feel a lot like losing, especially when the guy standing in Victory Lane signs your paycheck.
Just a few races ago Reddick held a commanding 129-point advantage in the standings. Now? That cushion has been chewed down to just 19 points.
Why?
Because Hamlin has apparently decided retirement can wait.
Sunday marked Hamlin’s third consecutive win, and while Reddick salvaged that runner-up finish, most of his afternoon looked less like a title defense and more like a man trying to stop a flood with a beach towel.
He collected no stage points. He wasn’t really in the conversation for the win. His race only came alive thanks to a strategy gamble, staying out long while most of the field blinked first and pitted.
For a moment, it looked clever.
Fresh tires. Clean air. A charging Reddick slicing through traffic.
Almost.
“It almost worked,” Reddick said afterward. “When you go that long, it all kind of falls to how you catch cars.”
That was the catch.
Reddick said the strategy lost roughly a second and a half after catching slower traffic running side by side.
“Everyone is racing hard for track position,” he said. “Some of it’s just bad luck, I guess, where you catch cars.”
Reddick also knew second place alone wasn’t going to stop the bleeding in the standings.
“Yeah, it’s a bummer. I mean, if the 11 wasn’t the winner, you could consider this a good day.”
That’s championship racing in one sentence.
Reddick also pointed to a critical restart late in the race where he thought he had a tire going down entering Turn 1.
“He went into one, felt squishy, soft,” Reddick explained. “It wasn’t down. I would have crashed if not.”
That hesitation cost him.
A bad restart dropped him behind Hamlin and the other front-runners, and from there the race became damage limitation rather than trophy hunting.
The irony, of course, is delicious.
Reddick isn’t being hunted by a rival team.
He’s being hunted by his boss.
And if Hamlin keeps collecting trophies at this pace, the championship leader may soon find himself doing something that seemed impossible a month ago:
Giving the crown back.
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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