Q. What an incredible family moment for you guys. To do it at a road course and to beat Chase Elliott, there’s got to be some significance there.
TYLER REDDICK: Oh, a hundred percent. We were here last year. It was kind of an unfortunate circumstance. We were in a spot where we had to kind of race our way into the playoffs on points, and I really felt we had a really strong car here last year and Chase Elliott was able to go out and win that race. We had good speed but we kept having to lose all of our track position to stay out and get those stage points, and just looking back at that race from last year, it was a bit frustrating because I felt like we had a good car because we were just in that box at that time of the year where we had to chase points instead of flipping the strategy and flipping the stages like we were able to do today and just go for the win.
Q. Speaking of being frustrated, we’ve all been saying, we hope we don’t look back at Bristol with what happened to you there because you ran the perfect race until somebody decided to try to do something a little crazy on the last lap there and took you out. You handled that so well, but a little redemption here today that you were able to not only do it but as Marty said, you passed the guy that over the last four years has been the most dominating driver on these road courses. The next to the last run had to give you a lot of confidence as you were able — the first driver all day to really keep Chase in sight and start running him down at the end of that run?
TYLER REDDICK: Yeah, we had a really good car. I knew that pretty much from the get-go of practice. It took off really strong and then we kind of run up on some traffic and kind of got stuck.
I knew in this race today that we were going to have to fight really, really hard for track position and avoid the big mistakes. Fortunately it went that way. I was hoping that I could have gotten by Chase by the last pit cycle because new tires were probably going to make it more challenging to pass, but fortunately a couple mistakes or just a couple opportunities presented themselves where I was able to get alongside him going into Turn 6.
Q. I don’t know at what moment you perked up. I’m sure the race off pit road you thought, oh, I’m a lot closer than I thought I was going to be. I’m sure at that moment you’re thinking, we’ve got a shot here. But walk us through the pass. We’re going to give you plenty of time before you make the pass. What are you thinking here as you’re catching Chase up at 14 and up the hill?
TYLER REDDICK: Just all day long, you could kind of get in this range, but it was really hard to break through the barrier and be able to pull alongside and attempt to pass. Just running in the draft behind another car down the straightaways would really burn the brakes up, so you just had to manage that pretty good.
Q. You guys flashed by all the cars pitting there, now you’re down into 3 right here.
TYLER REDDICK: You know, most of the day Chase was a lot better and a lot of the competition was better than I was in Turn 3 but as the day went on I was able to get better in Turn 3, and obviously this is about as good as you can hope for coming down the straightaway, try and have a little bit of a draft and try and get alongside him going into the corner, but thankfully I believe Chase overdrives it just a little bit, I think we both do actually, we both do here, but that allowed me to get alongside him, kind of squeeze him a little bit on rumble strips and be where I was going into 6, which is a difficult corner to go side-by-side through.
Q. From that point, once you get by here, 6, 7 and 8 seemed to be where you could really make up and gap yourself a little bit more and you did a great job here of knowing when you had enough room there to cut in front.
TYLER REDDICK: Yeah, certainly, and just coming out of 7, I knew that this was his opportunity to really kind of counter attack, if you will, make a charge back at me, so I didn’t want to do the aggressive move, try and block him and end up off the racetrack. I kind of felt like if I could stay to his outside through Turn 8 that I’d have the preferred lane, the carousel, and thankfully it worked out that way.
Q. A few laps later the 9 starts catching you, Randall goes, stop looking in your mirror, look out the windshield. Were you guilty of that? Did he catch you —
TYLER REDDICK: I was certainly looking in the mirror every corner, but I was kind of using that to gauge what was a good corner, what was a bad corner, kind of like you would looking at SMT, just figuring out, okay, got a good run off this corner, I didn’t get a good run off that corner, just kind of figuring out what I needed to adjust. Just as the laps were closing in, I was trying to manage the brakes a little bit, and towards the end I just started to attack the brakes again, kind of like I was running behind him, and the car was taking it. So that kind of, I think, allowed us to pull back away there at the end. I think I was being a little too cautious trying to save a little bit too much, almost created an unideal situation there to allow him to close it back in.
Q. As a professional athlete, you’re the best at what you do. You’re one of the best in the world. We’re also very sensitive people as professional athletes, and you hear the rumblings. How big of a relief is it to get this win? You’ve had to have heard, this guy is so talented, these opportunities have slipped away, when is he going to win the race?
TYLER REDDICK: I mean, honestly it’s funny you say that because down there in Victory Lane that was one of the biggest things that came to mind is just it was a huge sense of relief for not just myself and my whole team, my crew chief Randall Burnett. There’s a lot of members on my team that have been racing in the Cup Series, racing in NASCAR for a very long time and haven’t won a race, either.
So to — it’s not just a huge sense of relief for me, it’s a huge sense of relief for this entire team, for RCR, because the effort and the time and how close we’ve been most of the year and to not get it done is very tough, but going through tough times makes tough people get through the tough times, and we were able to do that today and persevere and come out on top.
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