Tyler Reddick has begun the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series season on a historic pace, winning four of the first six races. He became the first driver to ever go back-to-back-to-back in the first three weeks, and now he's added another one at Darlington Raceway.
His emergence, after he and his 23XI Racing team endured a nightmare of a season last year, should be one of the coolest stories in the sport. But this is NASCAR, where we can't have good things without somebody finding a way to ruin them.
Due to the timing of 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports having effectively won their anti-trust lawsuit against the sanctioning body in December, the narrative that's emerged is that something must therefore be tainted about Reddick's success. Because there's just no other possible explanation, right?
Let's take the 23XI Racing "rigged" accusations and throw them in the trash, where they belong
Anytime something even remotely coincidental happens in NASCAR, it always has to be rigged. Danica Patrick's Daytona 500 pole? Rigged. Jimmie Johnson's dynasty at Charlotte Motor Speedway while his sponsor Lowe's owned the track's naming rights? Rigged. Dale Earnhardt Jr. winning the first race at Daytona after his father's death? Uber-ultra-mega-rigged.
In this case, what we have is a driver who has always been good enough to collect checkered flags in bunches, but his team was holding him back. Now, with their major distraction behind them, 23XI Racing is finally executing at a competent level.
Even then, Reddick suffered a mechanical issue in the early going on Sunday and had to drive through the whole field to get back to the front. Was that part of the script?
Moreover, any conspiracy theory talk involving Reddick falls apart when you consider the fact that his two most recent wins have come on very possibly his two best tracks.
Daytona International Speedway and EchoPark Speedway (Atlanta Motor Speedway) produce unpredictable pack races where he can thank the luck bank above all else. But Austin's Circuit of the Americas (COTA) and Darlington are places where he's consistently run up front before, and he had previously won at the longer COTA layout in 2023.
In summary, any suspicious attributes of Reddick's 2026 season can be chalked up to pure happenstance. He is catching the breaks he didn't catch before, and riding a wave of momentum in the process. Sometimes a driver and team just get really hot. It's happened to plenty of others before, and right now it's his turn.
But don't tell that to perpetually unhappy NASCAR fans who always need to make something out of nothing.