NASCAR: Reddick rockets to pole position at Las Vegas

Tyler Reddick earned his third Busch Light Pole Award of the season Saturday morning at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. His Richard Childress Racing No. 8 Chevrolet will lead the field to the green flag in Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series South Point 400 playoff race (2:30 p.m. ET, NBC, PRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).

The 26-year-old Californian’s lap of 184.603 mph knocked fellow Chevy driver William Byron from the pole position and then Team Penske rookie Austin Cindric finished the session by grabbing the outside pole position on the final qualifying lap of the 10 cars that advanced to the second round.

Reddick also topped qualifying at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course and then at Texas Motor Speedway just three weeks ago. The three pole-tally is a career-best for the third-year Cup Series driver. Only hours before qualifying, Reddick was named to drive the No. 45 23XI Racing Toyota next year.

“It’s pretty awesome,’’ a smiling Reddick said of the day’s work.

Interestingly, in the 29 races held to date at the track, no driver has ever won the Las Vegas race starting from the pole position. Kyle Busch was the race winner and pole winner in 2009, but technically he did not actually start from pole position, having to move to the rear of the starting grid after an engine change.

Asked about the difficulty of turning a pole position into a win here, Reddick was surprised to learn the statistic as well.

“Hopefully we’ll change that tomorrow,’’ said Reddick, who did win a NASCAR Xfinity Series race at Las Vegas in 2019.

“I think the track just changes a lot from practice to qualifying,’’ Reddick added, “For us, when we’ve started on the pole or we started toward the front on these mile-and-a-halves, we’ve had a lot of speed and we just unfortunately had some things not go our way.’’

Byron will start third, alongside Team Penske’s Ryan Blaney, who boasted the fastest lap in practice. Blaney’s teammate Joey Logano, Trackhouse Racing’s Daniel Suárez, Joe Gibbs Racing’s Christopher Bell, Wood Brothers’ Harrison Burton, 23XI Racing’s Bubba Wallace and Reddick’s RCR teammate Austin Dillon rounded out the top 10 on the starting grid. Burton matches his best starting position ever at a non-superspeedway and highest any track since the 2022 Daytona 500 at Daytona International Speedway.

Only four of the eight playoff contenders – Byron, Blaney, Logano and Bell – advanced into the final round of qualifying. The other four playoff drivers will start a bit farther back, including Trackhouse Racing’s Ross Chastain, who will roll off 11th. Stewart-Haas Racing’s Chase Briscoe starts 16th with 2020 champion Chase Elliott 20th and JGR’s Denny. Hamlin, 31st in the 36-car field.

Brad Keselowski, who leads all current drivers with three Vegas victories, will start the No. 6 Roush Fenway Keselowski Ford from 25th.

Pole Winner Quotes

There was a moment off of turns three and four that might have slowed him down a little bit. He described that to two or three people here.. what was going on there?

“Well, it didn’t slow me down. I was either going to hit the wall or if I didn’t, it was going to be a really good lap. It wasn’t my intentions to be that close. I knew I was going to have to get through (turns) three and four really well; and that wall off of turn four came a lot closer and a lot sooner than I initially anticipated.

Man, what a turnaround for our group from practice this morning. Everyone on this No. 8 ALSCO Chevrolet worked really, really hard. We weren’t really firing off in practice where we wanted to be. We were a bit off and we really went to work. We found some life in the second run. We tried a couple of things on the third run that didn’t really pan out. Just again, my team made some fantastic adjustments going into qualifying and got our car a lot closer. Still a little sketchy through (turns) one and two, but it carried a lot of speed. We learned a lot and we’ll be able to make some pretty good adjustments going into tomorrow’s race.”

What does this run tell you about getting the checkered flag and the trophy tomorrow?

“It’s a long race, that’s for sure. It’s nice to have that track position. We’ve been really fast at these 1.5-mile tracks and this is one of the first practices that we really didn’t show that, so it was really nice to turn it around like we did. We’ll have a great pit stall for tomorrow.

We have a lot to digest here. It’s still morning out here, but we have a lot of things to look at. I don’t think we need to do anything crazy, but I do think we’ll need to make some small adjustments to prepare for the race.”

Is it safe to say now that anything good that happens to you and the No. 8 team, it’s nice to have them happen as you end your time with them?

“Yeah, man. We work really, really hard as a group. We’ve come a long way in the three years. I’ve learned a lot on the Cup side as a driver and it’s been great to do it with a lot of the same people over the years. We fight together as a group. Unfortunately, we can’t always bring our families. I get to bring Alexa and Beau quite a bit. It’s tough to be away from your families, but we sure make the most of the time we have together. We enjoy working together. We have fun and we enjoy the time that we spend together at the race track and that’s the biggest thing. We get to do what we love. We get to have a lot of fun and enjoy being together as a group as we do it.”

Starting Lineup