“I feel like we are really solid and feel like I did going into COTA this year,” said Tyler Redick on the eve of this weekend’s Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Sonoma. The native of Corning, California has reason to be amped up, as Reddick raced to his first victory as a member of the 23XI Racing team earlier this year in triple overtime at COTA.
“Sonoma is a place I didn’t get to come down to and see a lot of racing at when I was younger,” said Reddick. “But yeah, it is the closest thing that I have to a home track. My previous two starts here were not the greatest, but I think that everything we hit on last year really came in to its own after this race one year ago. And then on top of that, the race here a year ago we had some issues along the way with parts failures that really took us out of it, but our confidence is definitely high here. Our sim program went really well on Wednesday. I’m just excited to see what our pace is going to look like tomorrow.”
Reddick has a special enthusiasm for turning left and right in his Cup car.
“I really do like the road-courses,” said Reddick. “Each track is quite different from the next on the current schedule that we have. I really like the preparation that goes into it all. You need to know how you manage a race, you know? You need to manage how you attack and make passes. It’s just a lot of fun. It all really forces you to start over and reset before every road-course race that you go to. You know the things that work at one track don’t apply to the next track.”
Reddick comes off a 35th place finish at last Sunday’s race at WWTR.
“I really enjoyed the track last Sunday,” said Reddick. “It’s a fun track, but we certainly had some trouble along the way unfortunately. It was lessons learned for us. There’s nothing for us to be concerned about going into Sonoma this weekend. That’s just the nature of a track like World Wide where two corners are different with widths and shapes and the banking is different. It always makes for a very interesting race. Gateway is a great track and St. Louis area is a great, great market and I’m glad NASCAR has finally tapping into that market. I’ve really enjoyed racing there the last two years.
“We certainly are in the mix almost every weekend now. The one thing that has just been holding us back is a little bit of inconsistency. We had a good stretch of that the last couple of weeks. I’d say we were not our best at Gateway in the race. The weather conditions being considerably cooler after what seemed like an hour and a half weather delay; it changed the track and took away from where our strengths were. But one thing I really love about this team and this year so far is on our good days we are battling for wins as expected, but on our bad days and at our worst, we’re a 15th