Our regular season champion may have gotten a tad too excited. Tyler Reddick had almost clinched victories three times this season – with runner-up finishes at Las Vegas, Chicago, and Indianapolis. The first one may have stung the most, as he had hounded Kyle Larson till the very end, letting him slip by for a scant 0.143-second gap. So the 23XI Racing driver was prepared to ace his second outing at the 1.5-mile tri-oval aggressively and that turned literal.

Reddick’s boss, Denny Hamlin, analyzed his driver’s moves that led to the lap 89 crash. In a series of ill-calculated moves, Reddick collected other drivers, including Chase Elliott. Hamlin went on to point fingers at his own driver for causing a mess in Las Vegas.

Brash driving raises boss Denny Hamlin’s eyebrows

Initially, the No. 45 Toyota was on a roll on Sunday. Tyler Reddick started second alongside Christopher Bell on the pole, starting the race 10 points above the elimination line. He soon surged to the lead and held it for 9 laps, winning stage 1. But soon after, things went haywire – Reddick played offense on the restart and tried to gain as much ground as possible. But the transition from the infield grass to the track and a three-wide run with Elliott and Martin Truex Jr upended his car. It rolled over, collecting Chase Elliott and Ryan Blaney.

In an episode of ‘Actions Detrimental,’ Denny Hamlin probed the chaos. “You could see it brewing…Tyler Reddick was coming on the very top side. You gotta kind of plan for that…in these Next-Gen cars you can’t just turn left…you don’t have that excess grip. As these cars get closer to each other…boom, they take a hard right because it takes the downforce off each car.” Hamlin then laid down a harsh verdict for his driver: “It was probably a little bit too aggressive on Tyler’s part…He’s trying to have one of these big days and he’s clearly got a car that can win. He doesn’t want to get trapped back in traffic. But it really seemed like you’re asking a lot from your competitors down low to leave a lane really late on the exit of the corner.” 

When Tyler Reddick emerged from the infield care center, he said he needed to be “more aggressive.” But Denny Hamlin countered that opinion, saying that Reddick should have been more considerate to his competitors. “If you want to make a move three-wide high, you need to get established three-wide. Probably at least by three-quarters of the way through the corner. That allows time for the spotters to tell the 19 and the 9, hey, now you’re three-wide…40% of the corner we’re already accelerating…To ask us to change direction that late in the corner, there’s just no opportunity to do that and it’s also too late to lift.”

Denny Hamlin thought about Chase Elliott’s dire situation. The Hendrick Motorsports driver should not have been in the foray.

Elliott drew sympathy from Hamlin

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The Most Popular Driver hit the news two weeks ago in Talladega regarding the hotly debated DVP rule. Despite being regarded as NASCAR’s pet, Chase Elliott’s playoff fortune has been far from okay. The Texas winner has collected only two top-fives and four top-tens in the postseason, a poor serve for the 2020 Cup Series champion. The Las Vegas wreck marked his third chaotic dilemma after Watkins Glen and Talladega. And he did not even have anything to do with it, as Denny Hamlin argued, “The 9 tried to back out, but it was too late…He had nothing to do with any of it. He was just an innocent bystander.”

Leaving him a dire 53-point deficit below the cutline, the race put Chase Elliott last among playoff contenders. Tyler Reddick’s chaotic moves left even the HMS driver flabbergasted. “(Tyler Reddick) was coming with a really big run on the top. I don’t think Martin (Truex Jr.) knew that, and he was kind of running as if we were two-wide. I recognized that there wasn’t going to be enough room, I bailed and there was just nowhere to bail. It was too late…I was, personally, just trying to get out of the situation, and it was just a little too late at that point. It sucks. Our No. 9 Chevy was really, really good there at the start. It was the best we’ve been out here in this new car, so it was just a bad day for that.”

Evidently, our regular season champion is drawing flak from the garage. With his boss, Denny Hamlin, also chiding him, Reddick may need to soothe his soaring excitement to win.