By Caleb Whisler, Staff Writer
Tyler Reddick found himself two turns short of winning the O’Reilly Auto Parts 300 at Texas Motor Speedway. But after contact with Cole Custer going into Turn 3, he found himself in the second position.
On the second to last restart of the race on Lap 194, Reddick was able to obtain the race lead. In the final restart of the race, he was able to get a small jump on the field in a three lap dash to the finish.
Coming off Turn Two on the final lap, Cole Custer made a move to the inside of Reddick. Custer was able to use his momentum to pass Reddick, but they made contact by the midpoint of the backstretch.
The contact with Custer broke the momentum Reddick had
“I opened the door for us to be side by side. I made an error trying to be as aggressive as I can to put myself in the best position possible to be on his corner panel to hopefully beat him off the corner to the start-finish line,” he stated.
“Unfortunately, we hit each other. We almost ended both of our days right there. It wasn’t what I had in mind. We are racing hard. Unfortunately, we lost it on the last lap. There is a lesson to be learned there.”
Going into the final three lap dash, Reddick knew that his car was tight. His main goal was to hold the bottom line.
He had to stall out his run by slowing his corner speed down in the center of the turn. Because of that, Custer was able to use his momentum off the corner to challenge for the race lead.
Despite finishing second, Reddick was proud of the way his crew worked the entire weekend to make a “bad” car run well.
“Hats off to our guys, we didn’t have a good car all weekend long. Our Chevy struggled really bad in practice yesterday. My guys worked really hard to make our car better yesterday. We were close to where we needed to be. We did what we had to do to make our car better. The driver has to be a little bit smarter.”
Going into the penultimate race of the season at ISM Raceway in Phoenix, Reddick finds himself second in the Playoff standings, only 20 points above the cut line.