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NASCAR CUP SERIES: O'REILLY AUTO PARTS 500July 19, 2020Tyler ReddickFort Worth, Texas THE MODERATOR: Thank you for joining us, Tyler. As excited as I'm sure you are for an RCR victory, it's probably a little disappointing to come up a little bit short. Take us through the last few restarts, what was going through your mind. TYLER REDDICK: Well, it's just one of those deals where it's risk versus reward. For us, to race against my teammate, as much as it's my responsibility to win for this Cat Oil and Gas Chevrolet, I don't want to take a win opportunity away from either RCR car. Just trying to race as hard as I can without getting the 3 in a position where he lifts, slides up, makes me lift, the cars behind us have an opportunity there to win that race. I just tried to do it as best as I could. I'm not going to lie, he did a really good job in the restart zone of keeping me from getting into a rhythm, being able to work with the 18 behind us, who is one of the best. Had me all jacked up. Kyle couldn't give me the pushes that he was wanting to give me for himself to battle with the 3. Just got to continue to work on that. A lot of these restarts throughout the year, we've been in mid pack, we haven't had the opportunity to play with that on the front row. Just came down to that launch. That's something that I didn't do a great job of during the last couple restarts. THE MODERATOR: We'll take questions for Tyler. Q. You're really in the thick of this Playoff race now. Does that change anything you've been doing? Do you have to be more conservative going forward? How do you approach these races as the homestretch comes? TYLER REDDICK: This further cements what I really pressed to my team before starting this race. We have nine races. We have 42 points to make up. Hopefully we can make up more than that. Seems like we already did that one race. Now it's about beginning to press and try to be in position to win these races, but not go all in and take a top five day and crash out and lose all those points. We got to keep being aggressive like we are to get up there with strategy call. Randall Burnett did a great job. Had a fast car. Made some bad adjustment on it. Hurt us, lost a lap. We were in dire situations, two laps down at times. Between catching the right breaks, getting our car back where it was at the beginning of the race when we had good pace, what it took to get our Caterpillar Oil and Gas Chevrolet back up there. It allowed us to take fuel only at the end, really mix it up, and really put my teammate right next to me. It was between us. Q. Do you feel this was a little bit of an upset for you guys going 1‑2 or have you been strong enough this year that if you got yourself in position you could do this? TYLER REDDICK: Well, it's been really difficult. I mean, last two races I've drawn 24th. It makes it really hard to get that track position. The pit stall you get isn't the greatest. The odds are kind of stacked against you at the beginning of the day. The guys that are in the top 12 in points, they draw pits from the race before. You get what I'm saying? They get the track position at the beginning. It helps them get the race going. If your car is off a little bit, you make a small mistake, it can really upset the outcome of your race in general. Yeah, we got up there and we stole some track position at the end. Austin and I had good pace on our cars when we had track position. That's the name of the game at tracks like that that are repaves, have a little bit of age, but the tire falloff isn't quite there. That's what makes track position king. Q. What can this do for the organization? TYLER REDDICK: Hopefully push it in the right direction. We've been looking for validation for a long time, what's the right way to go, which direction we need to take our cars and team. It's been really hard to search and find that with how much the track position plays into the handling of your vehicle. Today we saw the capability of both of these cars. Once you got our Chevrolets in that better track position, clean air, it showed itself. It's going to be a big confidence booster for myself, Austin. It is going to push the guys back at the shop, the men and women back at the shop, to work hard to give us fast racecars, from the upper management all the way down. A nice little uplift to take us into the next race Thursday at Kansas, a good track for me. Q. How challenging was it with the tires? Did that play any role in the difficulty in firing off and doing what you wanted on restarts? TYLER REDDICK: It was my understanding the 3 was on no tires like we were. But it's possible he took two. There's a lot going on there. You know, it's possible it hurt the initial takeoff. Austin was really able to eat some ground on me there, really execute well there. Maybe that was some of it. I'm not going to make excuses and say it was. I got to do better. I got to really focus on the things that could have potentially taken away from this race, what can we do to change them from hopefully keeping it from happening in the future. All in all, great day for our team. Q. Unofficially you're about 14 points out of the final Playoff spot. How significant is that with the number of races left at this point going into a Kansas, track you feel good about? TYLER REDDICK: We're not where we need to be at. But with eight races, 14 more points to get, having Austin locked in I think could be a benefit to us. We just got to keep running races like this. We're not going to get lucky every single day, every single outing we have, get cars caught up in messes that we stay out of. We will continue to stay vigilant and keep our Caterpillar Oil and Gas Chevrolet out of those messes, keep finishing these races. Name of the game, we were two laps down at one point. We never gave up. We had some luck go our way. We had some things fall at the right time and it got us back into the game. Q. Can you talk about how intense it was dealing with the heat today, how hard it was? Also what kind of goes into hydrating and training? TYLER REDDICK: It's just your preparation of the week, the week leading in. Just taking the thought, maybe I should drink a little bit of water. Especially if you're outside doing yard work, working on cars, whatever it might be that you do. Being outdoors, rehydrate your body, keep that replenished. A little bit harder than I expected. Once you're in it, you're kind of stuck with what you got. You can bring some fluids, bring some bags of ice. It can help. You really have to stay on top of it going into the race. A little harder than I expected. We got some cautions at the right time and whatnot that kind of cooled it back down rather quickly. I'd say the last hundred laps weren't too bad at all. THE MODERATOR: Tyler, we appreciate your time. We wish you the best of luck later this week in Kansas. TYLER REDDICK: Thank you all very much. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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