This is what it looks like when a plan starts to come together.
For the first time in company history, 23XI Racing is in sole possession of the NASCAR Cup Series championship lead and it comes two weeks before the end of the regular season. It’s a really good time to start putting all the pieces together for another autumn championship run.
When Denny Hamlin signed Tyler Reddick in the summer of 2022, well over a year before his contract was supposed to end, he said this was the opportunity to sign a generational talent.
Hamlin struck early and with an offer Reddick couldn’t turn down because there was conviction that this was the quickest path to get the Michael Jordan co-owned organization towards perennial championship contention.
Reddick has won four times in 60 starts, is the current championship leader on the path to entering the playoffs as one of the highest seeds seeds and poised to be a cornerstone for the organization for the foreseeable future after winning at Michigan International Speedway on Monday.
“The biggest thing is that I hired him based on everything I saw on the race track,” Hamlin said. “I didn’t know how much of that was natural talent. I didn’t know how much of that was natural talent or what was just him working to get better.
“I just didn’t know. I only knew the results. I raced around him enough to know that guy pushes the edge and that he can find the edge of the car.”
The irony isn’t lost on Hamlin that the growth of the team he owns is also presenting a challenge to his personal ambition of winning that elusive first drivers championship.
“It’s certainly going to make my path a lot harder,” Hamlin said. “But that’s what I started the team for. This is part of the crux of being a team owner and a driver, you’re going to have to deal with the days they beat you. The way I see it, I give myself three shots to win every weekend. Yes, I would prefer that I win but the winning feeling goes to about 80 percent when my cars win, right? It’s still a really, really good day.”
Reddick was asked on Monday about the risk he took in jumping on board a relatively new team in 23XI Racing that didn’t have the cache of the legacy organizations. It’s not inconceivable that he could have received offers from Joe Gibbs Racing, Stewart-Haas Racing or Team Penske.
“Potential, I think, was one part of it,” Reddick said. “I saw week in and week out, racing against both their cars, the speed they bring to the table, the culture that they have at 23XI. That was important to me.”
Also, it was a chance to work directly alongside Hamlin, one of the best of his generation, and Jordan, arguably the greatest sportsman of all-time.
There has been value in both picking Hamlin up for race craft advice and Jordan for his GOAT mentality.
“What I’ve been really happy to see is that he just works,” Hamlin said. “He asks a lot of questions. He’s very, very humble. He just really is always trying to get better. He’s going to come away this weekend with a laundry list of things that he feels like he can do better and the team can do better.
“That’s what I’m most impressed with. It’s why he’s going to be winning races and championships long after I’m gone.”
Even though MJ didn’t compete in NASCAR, Reddick says his intensity and drive has certainly bled into the Air Speed shop in Huntersville, North Carolina.
“Michael is a competitive individual,” Reddick said. “Over his career, what he brings to the table to motivate us, something that you can’t buy. It’s a great asset for us to have.
“Also having an owner and competitor in Denny is a great thing. I know he’s going to race us really hard on the racetrack, as he should. It’s nice to be able to lean on him and get information. It’s a two-way street, right, as it should be. I feel like he’s able to help me with a lot of things I don’t know about. I’m hoping in return there’s things I pick up on that can benefit him and the 11 car, too. It’s been fun, really great.”
To wit, Hamlin says his driver has pushed him to be better behind the wheel as well.
“There have been many times this year where we’re racing each other and I’m like, I tell him to do that,” Hamlin said. “It goes both ways. Like, I really feel like he’s pushed me in some areas that I haven’t been used to, as well. I think it’s working well together. …
“He’s got an unbelievable ability to drive a car. Now that he’s putting it all together, he’s managing races the way I thought, that was the biggest thing I thought he could improve on when he came over, was managing. Now you’re seeing these finishes because he’s managing the races like a pro.”
At this point, Reddick is already a perennial contender, but it’s just finding both the right level of aggression and luck to deliver a championship to Air Speed. Reddick says that for the longest time, he was still in pre-playoff format mode where he erred towards a conservative driving style which might have cost him wins but also gave him the consistency to be leading the points.
So, the next stage of his evolution will be finding balance between consistency and the aggression level to win races.
“When I feel like I’m in that position where I have to think about points and be a little smart, I think it’s a good thing for me because I like to be at 105 to 110 percent, and it pulls me back a little bit,” Reddick said.
“In the beginning of the race, I wanted to be more aggressive. I was like, ‘Man, I think I’m a little loose.’ And because I’m thinking of points, I pulled it back a little bit. I’m was like, ‘Yeah, let’s tighten it a little bit if we get an opportunity.’ Happened today, first time we hit pit road and it woke our car up.
“It’s a fine line with this car trying to understand what the balance is going to have. Sometimes if you have a little bit of wiggling in the back of this car, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re loose, it might be bumps.”
Reddick said having to points race early in his career taught him valuable lessons that now have him leading the championship standings with two wins. It’s working according to plan and Hamlin doesn’t want to change too much of everything that is going right presently.
“Certainly, based off of performance, they should get to the final eight, I would think, pretty easily,” Hamlin said. “But this is racing, and all kinds of crazy things can happen.
“You just don’t want to put the fear of God in him, ‘Don’t take this chance or that chance,’ because then you end up with a bad result. I think you just got to do what you’re good at and hopefully you don’t get unlucky.”
But all told, this is exactly where Hamlin, Jordan and Reddick all wanted to be two years ago when they mapped this journey out on paper.
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.