23XI Racing’s Tyler Reddick entered the white flag lap of the 2025 Daytona 500 in 13th place. In an overtime race finish that would see the requisite ‘big one’ amongst the lead cars on the backstretch of the 2.5-mile superspeedway, Reddick hustled the No. 45 Toyota through all the smoke to score a runner-up finish to Willaim Byron.
His best previous finish in the 500 was a 27th back in 2019 and 2021, and on that basis Reddick believes his 2025 NASCAR Cup Series season is off to solid start.
“I mean it’s really easy to get the year off to a bad start. In years past that is something I have definitely and unfortunately had happen to me,” he said.
“So just getting through Daytona on the lead lap and driving the car back to pit road, regardless of where I finished, was a win. It was even more so a win that we finished where we did and got some good points out of the day.
“Me and this whole team have talked about this and just wanting to get off to a good start this year. That’s something that I’ve never had in my career on the Cup level. I’ve never had a season get off to a good start. Obviously we’ll be able to reflect on it more after three or four weeks. Typically I leave Daytona with five points or 10 points or 11 points and you just start behind on points. It’s not like it’s impossible to make up, it’s just tough to start the year off behind. One race in, it’s nice to be fourth in points. Now if we go to Atlanta and run good and finish good and survive, we should be able to maintain that position or improve it, so that’s all we’re trying to do. I would love to get through these first three or four races in the points lead because I feel like we are more than capable of maintaining it through the summer.”
Never really a factor in the 500 leading into the third and final stage, Reddick was content to let the opening round of the season come to him, and adhered to his team’s race strategy.
“Well, with the strategy they have to implement, you don’t really want to mix it up at Daytona,” said Reddick. “If you run up front the whole stage you just burn a lot of fuel. It’s a gamble. If possible you just want to run as far back as possible without getting stuck in traffic, so it’s a game that is kind of played by everybody.
“We made it work okay at Daytona in stage one. We finished eighth in stage one and got some stage points. In stage two our plan kind of fell apart and we bailed out of it. In stage three, we were in a good place, but when it came time to go, we just ended up around some cars that either didn’t handle good or were very short of fuel, so we lost our track position that we fought so hard to maintain.
“You never want to just give up when you’re running 15th to 20th, but I just knew it was going to happen. I knew they were going to wreck. I cold have been wrong, but typically they wreck. The last four years we’ve run the Daytona 500, they’ve wrecked. Pretty much every year they wreck at the end, so I bailed out of it and waited and they wrecked. It was a scary crash for Ryan Preece, but it wasn’t the big wreck that I was thinking of happening. So when I lined up 16th in overtime, I didn’t know where we were going to end up. But I didn’t give the rest of the field that was left enough credit. They crashed later! We went through it.”