Just four weeks ago, Tyler Reddick and Kyle Larson were a sliver apart in their battle for the head of the Cup Series class, dueling for Regular Season Championship honors on Labor Day weekend at Darlington Raceway. Reddick earned the edge with a gutsy ride to a top-10 finish, pipping Larson by a single point but setting a course for both drivers to enter the 10-race playoff with a head of steam.
Steam, however, evaporates. The racing calendar hasn’t even flipped to the next month’s page, and these playoffs have already proved that any veneer of invincibility can wear thin.
Reddick and Larson finished one point apart from each other again in Sunday’s Round of 12 opener at Kansas Speedway, and Reddick again held the preferred side of that narrow margin. The rub, though, was that Reddick’s 25th-place result was just one spot better than Larson’s 26th — this at a track where Reddick was the defending race winner and Larson was its most recent victor.
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Reddick entered Sunday’s race with hopes of making Kansas a postseason reset, recapturing the sterling midsummer surge that propelled his No. 45 23XI Racing team to the head of the Cup Series class. In the four races since the playoffs dawned, Reddick is still searching for his first postseason top-five run, hovering at a 19.5 average finish during that span.
“I guess for me it comes to just performance,” Reddick said post-race at Kansas. “For a month straight, we haven‘t been that great, but we have two weeks to figure it out.”
The issue is that the two weeks that follow include visits to two tracks cocooned in uncertainty, from next week’s stop at Talladega Superspeedway to the Round of 12 closer at the new-look Charlotte Motor Speedway road course. He’ll enter that tricky two-week stretch reeling from a six-position drop in the playoff standings that left him four points below the provisional elimination dividing line.
On face value, Kansas loomed as the round’s brightest opportunity, but Reddick only went backward after lining up 11th for the next-to-last restart.
“That restart was a lot of it. That‘s just part of it,” Reddick said. “When you have really good cars you can make incredible moves on restarts and when things aren‘t just going the way you want them to inside the race car it‘s really easy to have a big mistake and that‘s what ultimately cost us our finish.”
Larson figured to reign supreme, based not only on his regular-season prowess, but also fresh from one of the season’s most dominant performances in last weekend’s Bristol Night Race rout. For the second consecutive round-opening race, however, Larson and his No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet group surrendered a significant chunk of their postseason buffer.
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In the Round of 16, an early crash in Atlanta’s playoff lid-lifter left the top-seeded Larson with a 37th-place finish and a 20-point loss relative to the elimination threshold. Sunday’s Round of 12 starter marked another drop from the standings lead after a Lap 19 wall scrape forced the former Cup champ to rally back onto the lead lap after a systematic series of repairs.
Larson called his Kansas slog “just a long day” — a far different outcome than the Bristol romp where he led 462 of 500 laps. “… It is what it is, but we‘ll regroup and move on to Talladega.”
He’ll head to the Alabama speed plant carrying just an 18-point margin over the elimination slash, more than halved from the plus-39 advantage Larson held when the round started. In these playoffs, further proof that the footing that divides those advancing from those ousted hangs by just a gossamer thread.