Tyler Reddick Is The First Driver In NASCAR History To Open The Season With A Three-Peat
Daytona, Atlanta, and now Austin; 23XI Racing driver Tyler Reddick has conquered them all, marking the first time since NASCAR's inception that a driver has won the first three rounds of the championship. You could argue that it was luck that saw Reddick take the Daytona win, but that's the case every year. Atlanta, like Daytona, saw Reddick run clean all day while most of the field got swallowed up in wrecks. But the road course at Circuit of the Americas didn't have any major crashes or retirements, and Reddick totally dominated the race regardless. The two oval wins took luck, talent, and preparation in equal measure, but COTA was 100% down to having the right car and running the cleanest and fastest race possible.
With road course ringer Shane Van Gisbergen breathing down his neck for almost the entire race, Reddick kept his cool and delivered one of the most stunning road course wins in recent memory. For the third time in three weeks team owner Michael Jordan got to stand in Victory Lane with Reddick and add yet another three-peat to the MJ legacy. Prior to this weekend, Reddick was only the sixth driver in NASCAR history to win the first two rounds of the season.
This victory put Reddick at the top of the NASCAR Cup points tally with a 70 point lead over teammate Bubba Wallace. In previous years the points wouldn't matter and these wins simply would have locked Reddick in to the playoffs. With the 2026 return of NASCAR to full-season points championship, Reddick is setting himself up nicely for a run at the title. Meanwhile 2025 champion, the infamous slur-shouting Kyle Larson, hasn't cracked the top five in any race yet, and sits 15th over 100 points behind Reddick.
How the race went
Despite qualifying on the pole position, Reddick was quickly shuffled backward at the start and settled into eighth place for a while. Chase Briscoe, Ryan Blaney, Christopher Bell, William Byron, and Shane Van Gisbergen all fought for the lead at different points throughout the race, but from about the middle of the second stage it was on for Reddick and he ran out to the front and maintained the lead despite stiff competition from behind. I don't know how many dudes have been able to keep their cool with SVG hassling their rear bumper, but to Reddick's credit he managed to stay as cool as a refrigerated cucumber.
The race itself took almost four hours to unfurl. If you ask me, that's probably about an hour too long for something like this. 95 laps is probably too many laps at COTA for a car that takes nearly two minutes to run the short National course. Saturday's O'Reilly series race was just 65 laps and that felt like the correct length for a race to be. Sunday's race was long enough for me to catch up on all of the laundry I've been putting off since my last road trip, so I guess there's that.
If you were paying attention on Sunday, there was a driver who provided an even more entertaining and impressive run than either Reddick or SVG. Youngster Connor Zilisch put up one of the best 14th-placed finishing races I've ever seen, and his finish only tells part of the story. Twice in that 95 lap fight did Zilisch push his way up into the top five only to get dumped from behind by someone who couldn't hit their braking marks. That kid was pure magic, and he will win a race this year.