In the first road course qualifying session of the year for the NASCAR Cup Series on Saturday at Circuit of the Americas, everyone was prepared to talk about the likes of Shane Van Gisbergen, AJ Allmendinger and Connor Zilisch.
How about Tyler Reddick and Bubba Wallace of 23XI Racing instead?
On one hand, a Reddick pole wasn’t exactly a surprise because he has reliably been one of the best at turning right and left since reaching the Cup Series. In fact, three of his first four victories came on road courses and that includes one on the previous Circuit of the Americas configuration.
Reddick has five starts fourth or better and has finished ninth or better in each of his four starts.
“Yeah, all in all it felt like it was hard for anybody in the field today to have a perfect lap,” Reddick said. “Certainly, it wasn’t that for me but hit the right areas that matter the most. Fortunately, put together a pretty good lap that was able to hold on there. Certainly, didn’t know the 9 (Chase Elliott) and some of the other cars, the capability of re-running a good time and what that was going to look like. All in all, we had a really good lap, and we were able to hang onto it throughout the whole session.”
Wallace, on the other hand, he used to suck at this discipline and would be the first one to tell you that too.
So how did he chalk this qualifying result up?
“Lucky, I guess,” Wallace said in a dead pan manner.
He’s joking of course and he has become a threat to compete for top-5s over the past 18 months or so on road courses after being a complete non-factor on them in the seasons prior.
“I’ve just been putting in a lot of work,” Wallace said. “Not only myself but this team and it’s all starting to click. I don’t know why I’m not over the moon excited about starting second on a road course. I don’t know. It just feels wonky to me. We did it. We executed. We were faster than all the other guys except for one and in our group. We’ll take it.
“I think, for me, the biggest thing is that we have put in a lot of work over the past month for this place and no fault of anyone, we were way off unloading. Our first practice, I was driving it to where I thought I was supposed to and I set the record of cutting turn 5 today. We pushed the envelope and figured it out.”
But when asked if Reddick slowed him up at the end of their respective qualifying laps, which did seem to be a slight factor at the end, Wallace gave it a hearty laugh.
“Yeah, he slowed me up,” Wallace said. “For sure. But no, I thought I messed him up being that close. He said I was too close and thought he messed me up and I thought I messed him up. It all worked out.”
Reddick said as much too.
“I remember going into (Turn) 1 and I’m like, ‘Dang, I wish he would’ve gapped himself a little bit more,’ because I felt like I was messing his lap up for sure,” Reddick said. “Talking to him after the fact, his focus was to go out and follow me and kind of see what I was going to do and try to mimic it.”
Wallace said Reddick ‘got a shitty Turn 1’ and that’s why he closed the gap ‘and told myself I can’t lift here now.’ Wallace said that Reddick is the best road course racer at Toyota and that everyone in their camp would choose to line up behind him to try to replicate his lap.
Reddick appreciated the show of respect and credited Wallace for the gains he has made too.
“Certainly, he’s on the path to getting better at the road courses,” Reddick said. “He’s learning and if he keeps it up here soon, I’ll be having to try to battle him head-to-head for these poles. It’s been really nice to see his growth and him improve and embrace the way we have to do things.”
Hocevar, by the way, thought his top-5 lap sucked and apologized to his team for it.
New track
Beyond the raw results from practice and qualifying, understand the variables at play this weekend in the shape of both the new short course layout and a new road course tire for this season produced by Goodyear.
First the course, which has been reduced from the 3.46-mile layout to the 2.30-mile configuration.
The extended track is the same one used by Formula 1 and Kyle Busch says it’s kind of a bummer that they are no longer using that layout.
“Running the shorter course, I get it,” Busch said. “But I just thought it was cool that we were on a F1 course and we didn’t have to travel the world to do that and it was in our backyard. That was the neatest factor to it.”
The reasons are shorter laps with more passes by fans in attendance, but also getting the leaders in traffic sooner, to create tighter racing throughout the field.
There is a tire barrier in Turn 6a that Reddick articulated perfectly over his team radio in qualifying.
“It’s kind of fun playing the game of how close you can get to the tire pack [in Turn 6A]. Haven’t got it yet, but we’ll see”
His boss at 23XI, Denny Hamlin said there was more room to navigate it than he thought there would be.
“It was wider than it was in the simulator,” Hamlin said. “Still, it’s a tight corner but overall I do like this layout a little better because it gives you more reps around the race track. More laps. I don’t think it takes away that many passing zones. Maybe just one or two.”
Alex Bowman said NASCAR needed to add something because drivers couldn’t see the corner until they added that on Saturday morning.
“There was no reference point, of like where the corner was because you come up over a blind corner in 6,” Bowman said. “I think it was the right move. Seven or eight of us sat with NASCAR over an hour yesterday to figure out where to place everything. It was a good call for sure.”
But he did concede that it’s a ‘super narrow corner’ and it will grab drivers over the weekend.
“Before that, it was just gravel and we would have jumped through the gravel and we would have spread it all over the race track so I think it was better to have placed something there.”
NASCAR originally had these 400 pound sand barriers on the esses too but drivers lobbied to have those removed.
Austin Cindric was one of them.
“Really, just for the fact, that if you go in there side by side and essentially get forced into one, you’re just going to destroy your race car,” Cindric said. “I think it was right what they did. I don’t think having barriers in that high speed of a spot is the answer so it was nice that they pulled back on that a little bit.
“I could see some big carnage going on there a little bit. And when you’re following someone through there a little bit, it’s hard to see. If they are two inches off it and you’re offset six inches, you smoke that thing. Hopefully, they’re just watching the limits, stuff like that.”
So instead, the penalty for cutting the esses will be to drive through a runoff lane, which is essentially a slower way around. Drivers are calling it the ‘joker lane’ and have endorsed this penalty instead of having to drive down pit road like last season.
“The little joker lane thing they got going on is a good idea,” Cindric said. “The thought the penalty of making a pass through pit road was probably a little bit harsh. That’s a lot of time lost. That little lane is going to be a little bit better in terms of being a fair penalty for that. I was happy they took those out because it could have been big trouble.”
Elliott was assessed a pit road drive through penalty for cutting the esses last year and approved of the joker lane too.
“That’s the tough thing when you have to start policing that,” Elliott said of track limits. “My situation last year, and I’m sure there are other guys in the same boat, I was going to spin out if I hadn’t corrected the car and I ended up off the road.
“I wasn’t trying to cut it. It wasn’t even close. In that situation, it’s just tough because I penalized myself by nearly having a spin, which sucks and hated that. At least this gets it done, and it will be fairly quick and the same for everybody.”
New road tire
This aggressively softer Goodyear tire compound is a bigger deal than the layout change, Cindric says.
“Learning the new layout and what that demands of the car and learning this new tire as well,” Cindric said. “That’s a larger piece more so than the layout in my opinion.”
Hamlin expects three seconds of falloff over the course of a 15-plus lap run.
“Seconds, more than likely two to three seconds should be the standard after 10 to 15 laps,” Hamlin said. “That’s big and I think that’s going to allow for passing, comers and goers.”
Road course ace Michael McDowell expects falloff but explained how practice didn’t really display how much.
“Practice is tough because when you come in and then re-run, it’s always a different sensation from when you go straight through a run but they showed some fall off,” McDowell said. “I don’t know what the wear looks like and I don’t know that we ran enough laps to show what that would be but they definitely lost speed.
“Hopefully that creates something tomorrow where we have to manage our tires … and that will create some opportunities.”
Starting lineup
- Tyler Reddick
- Bubba Wallace
- Chase Elliott
- Carson Hocevar
- Daniel Suarez
- Shane Van Gisbergen
- Kyle Larson
- Kyle Busch
- Ross Chastain
- Todd Gilliland
- Denny Hamlin
- AJ Allmendinger
- Ty Gibbs
- Connor Zilisch
- William Byron
- Michael McDowell
- Noah Gragson
- Chase Briscoe
- Christopher Bell
- Zane Smith
- Alex Bowman
- Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
- Joey Logano
- Chris Buescher
- Ryan Blaney
- Brad Keselowski
- Austin Dillon
- Ryan Preece
- Justin Haley
- Cole Custer
- Riley Herbst
- Erik Jones
- John Hunter Nemechek
- Ty Dillon
- Josh Berry
- Austin Cindric
- Cody Ware
