Tyler Reddick captured the NASCAR Cup Series regular season championship with a top-10 in the Southern 500.
He also had to overcome an awful case of diarrhea to stay in the car long enough to do it.
Early in the race, Reddick keyed up his in-car radio to tell crew chief Billy Scott that he was ‘throwing up and shitting myself’ behind the wheel. Even more remarkable was that he was inside the top-5 at the time and challenging for the lead.
It was paramount that Reddick stay in the car and maximize the day because he was racing Kyle Larson and Chase Elliott for the regular season championship and the playoff seeding implication that come with it.
The team tried to feed him Tums through the window net during a pit stop but they fell under his seat. The next stop, thet handed him a bottle of water with Tums and Imodium blended into it.
It somewhat relieved him and he went on to finish 10th and claim the regular season title.
“That’s the worst I’ve felt. I don’t know, I guess just a stomach bug or something,” Reddick said. “My son was feeling a little down last week at Daytona. We had to take him to the infield care center after the race. He was struggling pretty bad on race day, on Saturday.
“Yeah, I feel like midday Friday, started really struggling. I was hoping Saturday morning it would be gone. It was terrible on Saturday. Woke up Sunday with the same hope it would be gone again.
“Felt good pretty much all the way up until the race. I don’t know, just must have been the bump off of two or something. It just really, really got bad by the end of stage one. It just stayed there the rest of the way.
“Just really thankful that a lot of great people on our team. They were feeding me the right stuff in the car to help me manage it best as I could. Just smart people. Able to put the right stuff in my drink to help calm my stomach down. At one point, I was just waiting to puke all over myself. Thankfully they kept that from happening. A whole lot of other gross stuff.”
Reddick was absolutely sick but fortunately not as bad as he insinuated in real-time.
“I thought I was going to puke, I really did at the end of stage one, as soon as the yellow came out,” Reddick said.
So nothing out the other end either?
“I held on for dear life all night. I thought it was going to happen, but….” Reddick said.“I actually really just wanted to get it out because it was really, really bad. I took some Imodium at the infield care center earlier. That was the worst thing for me because I couldn’t get anything out that I wanted. It was just a rough night.”
But it did end with the regular season championship and claiming the number three seed the playoffs.
“It’s just a testament to all the hard work that everyone at 23XI, here at the racetrack, week in and week out, back at Airspeed, puts into this,” Reddick said. “We’re on year four of their goals, right? It’s just been really, really fun the last two years to be a part of this process, building up to where we want to be.
“I mean, it takes a lot of hard work to be consistent as we’ve been through the summer stretch. Both years really feel like we had rocky starts to get going. It’s nice to be able to get to where we did in the middle of the year and start thinking about points. I think it really helped us just continue to be more consistent, get us in the right mindset for these Playoffs, just managing risk versus reward. We’ll be doing it three races at a time here soon.”
