TOYOTA RACING – Tyler Reddick
NASCAR Cup Series Quotes
JOLIET, Ill. (July 4, 2026) – 23XI Racing driver Tyler Reddick was made available to the media on Saturday prior to tomorrow’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Chicagoland Speedway.
TYLER REDDICK, No. 45 Jordan Brand Toyota Camry XSE, 23XI Racing
You seemed to not be as happy with your car after practice yesterday. Why were you not optimistic?
“I didn’t think about that. Right when Marty (Snider) pulled me we were right in the heat of discussion of the things we wanted to keep working on, decisions we wanted to make to start the night. Just where we wanted to go from practice, what more we can make better, what we can change, what we need to be thinking about. The biggest thing on my mind was just how flat it was with this tire and that at other intermediate tracks it’s what we’ve come to know at other tracks. I guess I just walked away from practice scratching my head a bit. I thought there was going to be more fall off. The track has been dormant for awhile, but I just thought the tires would wear out more than what they did, we would have winded out more, eventually it would get there throughout the weekend. I was expecting it to fill more and more out, just not a lot of falloff throughout practice.”
How much did the rain coming through yesterday change the track and could that be a challenge this weekend?
“I guess we shouldn’t speak for everybody, but I was definitely thinking that tires would wear out and we would move around a little bit. It might just be how dirty the track was. They can go out there and blow the track, but just how much time it sat. They did a tire test here and a wheelforce test here, but the upper lanes of the racetrack was largely untouched. It might just take a little bit. I think the O’Reilly cars should help that. That’s going to be good for us in the race. I think by Sunday at the end of stage one or stage two, one of those, it will be back to the Chicago that we all know. Just top to bottom all the lanes kind of available to use. In the first run, it ate away the tires a little bit. But run two or run three it was just not as much lap time fall off, tire wear as we expected.”
What do you make of what the last month has been for you and your team?
“That’s racing. We had a really good start and we were reminded about how fast things can change. The nice thing for us is that it seems like the speed is there and the potential is there, we were just finally served a dose of races not going our way. Some of it you could argue was inflicted on ourselves. What we need to have with our cars with our team we still do have. We got a couple of not good points days. Funny enough at Pocono we ran well but still lost points. That’s how high of a level we have to execute right now. We have to be scoring lots and lots of points, not just getting the finishes. So we have to have clean days. We got to dig out of the hole pretty quickly here on Sunday and work our way forward.”
Does past experience matter here at Chicagoland?
“I definitely thought coming into this that past experiences would matter. One example of this is that yesterdays practice, past experience doesn’t matter quite nearly as much as I thought it was going to. I remember coming here in a O’Reilly car and lots of fall off, I’m sure they’re experiencing that right now. By nature, how different the Cup car can be kind of showed itself a bit yesterday and everyone expecting this race and this track act a certain way. Just what we saw yesterday, the NextGen car has kind of changed everything at a lot of these track of what we kind of knew before. Yesterday was just kind of a product of that.”
Are you expecting Michael Jordan to be here this weekend?
“When he is here it is nice to have him. Whether he’s here or not, he’s always checking in and seeing how things are going. Anytime we are able to have him here at the racetrack, I see the impact from it. But it leaves quite the impact on everybody on the team or part of the organization. Anytime we are able to have him here everyone is motivated to perform well for the organization, but when he’s here it gets everyone going a little bit, which is nice.”
How realistic is it in the middle of the race to go over the patch out there in turns 3 and 4?
“It’s certainly on our minds over the years. There’s been other tracks over the years where things have changed. There’s been years we went to Fontana, sometimes you want to hit the sealer and sometimes you want to avoid sealer depending on if it was new or it was old. The old Atlanta, a characteristic of it was the apron and the bottom lane kind of interacted and how white the paint was and the grip down there. It’s something we’ll explore, but as drivers there’s racetracks and moments when conditions are right for that kind of thing. There was a time they were putting PJ1 or resins on the racetracks and it was super line sensitive as well. It’s something over the years that the drivers have adjusted and adapted to.”
What are your favorite memories of racing here coming up the ladder to the Cup Series?
The two that come to mind are my O’Reilly races. While they were good races, they were also awful memories. I remember my year at JR Motorsports, we were trying to just get this thing turned around we obviously won Daytona and we were a disaster the rest of the entire year. So as the playoffs were approaching we come here we win stage one racing against Harvick, Larson was coming from the back, it had the potential to be a really strong day for us. Then we had a slow pit stop and then I sped on pit road the next stop and we were crashed. Good or bad memories, looking back on it we have been able to find speed or we have good speed in our racecars or a combination of both. Naturally coming into this weekend I look into my two most recent races I know it’s a great track for me from my past experiences. If you look at the sheet in practice, maybe that’s carried over. Seeing all of our 23XI cars towards the top is just good preparation and good teamwork coming into this. Hopefully it is a good track for me, it seems like on paper it’s going to be a good weekend for 23XI as well.”
How much do you expect Atlanta to change from when you were there in February?
“It is a change, but there was a period of time it felt like it was losing grip each time we returned. As of late it feels like it’s kind of stabilized. The two races we have there, the track is very different between the two and that’s the fun thing about it. I do enjoy going back to some of these racetracks twice in the calendar year. It is nice when do go twice we have conditions changed like they do. We go there in March, February and it’s cool, handling is not as big of a issue and everyone packs up and races really tight. We got back there in the summer races it’s easier to slip up and easier to track. Cars get more spread out because handling is important. So every time we come back for the second date when it’s warm the racing is just a bit different and that’s one thing I enjoy about that event. I like going to all these racetracks, but it is fun when they are different like that. It doesn’t take the exact same formula both times.”
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