Before the 2023 season began, Kyle Busch and Tyler Reddick both undertook an interesting career move. Busch, a 2x Cup champion, left the #18 JGR team for #8 of RCR, which was previously filled by Reddick, who made his way to 23XI Racing. So a comparison between the two seems like a fair one now that their first seasons in their new teams are done.
Advertisement
In 2023, Tyler Reddick scored his career’s win number three and first win of the season in the Cup Series race at the Circuit of The Americas, leading a race-high 41 of the 75-lap-long race. There, he skillfully cleared HMS sensation William Byron and bagged a dominant yet close win over two-time NASCAR Cup Series champion, Kyle Busch.
Furthermore, 2023 witnessed the longest run in the Championship rumble that the 27-year-old speedster has ever flaunted. Unfortunately, his performance at Martinsville Speedway was not enough to book him a Championship 4 slot.
Nevertheless, his playoff journey was marked by two top-5 finishes, one of which was a runner-up position at the playoff opener at Darlington Speedway and the other a P3 finish at Homestead-Miami. The biggest highlight for Reddick of his 2023 playoff journey was perhaps the win at Kansas.
This is the first time in the career of the #45 Toyota pilot that he put up a two-fold career-high performance in a single season, scoring ten top-5s and sixteen top-10s. Besides this, he bagged an array of pole awards that resulted in him cruising through three consecutive seasons with at least one pole win and a second consecutive year with multiple pole positions.
A lack-luster season for Kyle Busch
2023 marked the first season of Rowdy with his new crew chief, Randall Burnett. Although the duo seemed to be in perfect sync when Kyle Busch won three of the first 15 races of the season at Fontana, Talladega, and Gateway, he failed to grab the checkered flag after that.
The playoff journey was not a smooth one for the veteran racer either. In his first season with Richard Childress Racing, Kyle Busch got ousted from contention right in the second round of the playoffs and could only climb up to 14th place in overall points, his second-lowest finish in his entire Cup career.
Nevertheless, Busch has secured at least one victory in all 19 seasons of his Cup Series career. Among all his victories this year, none were as promising as the one at the World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway. The #8 star led one lap less than half of the 243-lap-long event.
But that does bring forward the fact that he has led the lowest number of laps (242) last season. Busch can only hope to pull up his socks and come back stronger than ever as NASCAR prepares to unleash its fury again next year.