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Tyler Reddick has romanticized so much about this moment over the past two decades because it was so unfathomable.
He won the Daytona 500.
But even after crossing the finish line, Reddick did not allow himself to feel literally anything. There was no immediate joy. No exuberance. He wasn’t even on the microphone’s button celebrating with his team.
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“I didn’t know if I’d won the race or not,” Reddick said. “In the moment, I knew I crossed the start-finish line first, but I don’t know if the yellow light was on before I got to the start-finish line and Chase (Elliott) was ahead of me. I didn’t know any of that stuff.
“Yeah, everyone wrecked, but again, I didn’t want to get ahead of myself. I didn’t want to think I’d won the race and then be told a couple seconds later I hadn’t. That would be devastating, especially after running second last year. I was just trying to keep myself in check until I knew I’d won.”
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This race has always meant a great deal to Reddick, even as a California dirt racer who grew up driving Outlaw Karts and Dirt Late Models, who wasn’t totally sure there was a pathway for him to even reach the Cup Series.
“I watched a lot of NASCAR racing growing up, but I would never miss a Daytona 500 as a little kid growing up out in California, sitting with my family on Sunday watching this race,” he said. “I dreamed of one day just having an opportunity to run in this race.”
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His first laps at the facility came in the annual January open test for the ARCA Racing Series. He drove a car for Briggs Cunningham.
“Yeah, I just remember going out there in an ARCA test and thinking this is crazy fast, and it just seems so surreal,” Reddick said. “I’ve watched so many races here as a kid growing up and I’m finally on the racetrack. I’m testing by myself, single-car stuff. But nonetheless, I’ve always dreamed of being able to drive off of Turn 4, through the tri-oval and see the stands. Yes, they were empty when I tested here, but just seeing this place, just stuff I dreamed about.
“Never would I know it would lead to me talking to you guys about winning a Daytona 500, but certainly as a young kid growing up, I always dreamed that hopefully this would one day be reality.”
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He ended up racing the ARCA race that year and finished in the top-five. That kick started a pavement career. At the time, Reddick was already the youngest winner in the history of the famed Lucas Oil Dirt Late Model Tour. It wasn’t a fait accompli that he would always end up in NASCAR.
“I was racing at Volusia Speedway,” Reddick said of the 2009 Daytona 500. “I think it was the year Kenseth won the rain-shortened race here. But racing Volusia for my first or second time in a late model, and me and my family came out to the racetrack, we parked our toter home I feel like a mile-and-a-half away from the dang racetrack, but we had tickets on the backstretch grandstand, and our whole family, we went up in the backstretch there and we watched the race.”
He called it the craziest thing he had ever seen.
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“But for me, being at Daytona and seeing the Cup cars on the racetrack was just so unreal,” Reddick said. “I’ve gotten to watch it on TV but being here and watching that was just a really cool moment. It was a shame the race did get rain shortened and everything, but every time the cars came down the backstretch, they’re moving. They’re going so fast.
“It was just a really fun moment to be able to spend with my family. Yeah, it was a shame it got shortened by rain but we still had a bunch of fun.”
That isn’t the only reason this victory was so impactful. The past year had been genuinely awful for Reddick. He went winless in 2025 after a three-win championship-race campaign in 2024. At home, he welcomed his second son, Rookie, in May but the roddler developed a tumor that created some rough moments in the second half of the season.
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He’s doing well now and the Reddicks had both Beau and Rookie at the track to celebrate with them on Sunday.
“The only time I’ve ever felt the level of emotions I did in that moment was winning the pole at the Charlotte Roval when Rookie was in the hospital,” Reddick said of the race weekend in October. “For me that was a whole different set of reasons, everything that my son was going through, our family was going through.”
Tyler Reddick, 23XI Racing Toyota
Tyler Reddick, 23XI Racing Toyota
How Reddick responded to everything, both on and off the track, really impressed team co-owner Denny Hamlin, who had his own share of personal woes to deal with this past winter. Hamlin said 23XI had a competition meeting last month to address some of the things that went wrong in 2025 and that Reddick was the only one with a pen and paper.
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“That’s what we want out of him, right,” Hamlin said. “I knew four or five years ago, whenever it was that I talked to him for the first time about, ‘hey, I need you over here’ … I just knew that his ceiling was so, so high.
“Last year, the expectations were certainly higher than the results as a whole but hopefully, winning a race like this will relieve a lot of the self-pressure Tyler puts on himself. Hopefully, he can race this season loose like he always has.”
All told, all of this is a reflection that this is simply what Reddick does, working hard from day one. It landed him in the Cup Series and now it’s earned him the Harley J. Earl Trophy.
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“I think for me, you never know what the future holds if you keep your dreams big, if you work really, really hard,” Reddick said. “Obviously you’ve got to make sacrifices along the way, as well, whether it’s yourself or your family.
“Everyone in my family put a lot into this. I put a lot into this, my parents, my grandfather, my grandparents, and it just took everyone’s teamwork like we had today to make moments like this reality.”
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