He wanted to win that one for himself.
It’s gotta be a little strange for Tyler Reddick and Denny Hamlin to find themselves racing each other for the win at the end of a NASCAR Cup Series race.
Denny, of course, drives the #11 car for Joe Gibbs Racing, but is also the co-owner of 23XI Racing alongside NBA legend Michael Jordan, and owns the #45 car of Tyler Reddick along with the #23 car of Bubba Wallace and the #35 car of Riley Herbst. And yesterday at Kansas Speedway, the owner found himself battling his own driver at the end of the race.
Thanks to some pit strategy, Denny was leading the race with just a handful of laps to go. But a hard-charging Reddick managed to run him down and even pass his boss – before he ran out of fuel and scraped the wall with just three laps to go.
Reddick was able to switch to the secondary fuel pump and keep his car running, somehow only falling back to second place, but the chance to win appeared to be out the window.
That is, until the last-place car of Cody Ware blew a tire and spun out as leaders were coming to the white flag, bringing out a caution and sending the race into overtime.
Everybody came down pit road during the caution, with the leaders taking two tires (and, importantly for Reddick, some more gas), and on the restart Kyle Larson managed to get by both Hamlin and Reddick and appeared to be on his way to a win. But Hamlin and Reddick raced each other hard, and even after falling back to fourth at one point, Reddick somehow passed Larson in the final turn to score his fifth win of the season.
It was a pretty wild finish to what was an otherwise pretty boring race, and afterwards Michael Jordan made it clear that he planned to do some trash talking to his 23XI Racing co-owner:
“I’m racing against Denny. So in essence, I really wanted to beat him because I know we’re going to talk a lot of trash a little bit later. But it was a good race.”
Denny, however, clearly wasn’t in the mood to hear the trash talking.
Cameras captured MJ walking up to Denny on pit road after the race, and…well, his reaction said it all.
Yeah, he wasn’t amused.
Denny spoke with NASCAR on Fox about the most disappointing part of having that win slip through his fingers thanks to the late-race caution.
“Obviously it’s not winning. It’s Cody Ware, six laps down, wrecking. I don’t know, just add it up.”
When it was first announced that Denny would be starting his own NASCAR Cup Series team, there were a lot of questions about whether he would take it easier on his own cars on the track. But I think we can safely say that’s not the case, because he’s proven that he wants to win no matter who’s he’s racing against and isn’t afraid to race 23XI just as hard as everybody else.
But he should also know that Michael Jordan’s going to rub it in his face when he gets beaten by his own team for the win.
