Tyler Reddick just did something no driver in NASCAR Cup Series history has ever done: won the first three races of a season. His victory at Circuit of the Americas, holding off road course specialist Shane van Gisbergen, capped a run that started at Daytona and continued at Atlanta before landing in Austin with a statement performance on a track type van Gisbergen was supposed to own.
A Battle That Came Down to the Final Laps
The race had plenty of shape-shifting before it got to that finish. Chase Briscoe went three-wide into Turn 1 early alongside Reddick and Ross Chastain, briefly taking control before Ryan Blaney’s long-run pace took over. Van Gisbergen, starting 13th, spent the opening stage slicing forward with the kind of precision that made him the popular pick to win at a road course like COTA.
A caution for a loose wheel that sent Chastain spinning reshuffled the strategy board again, and several leaders, Reddick, Blaney, and van Gisbergen among them, chose to stay out on older tires rather than pit, betting on track position over fresh rubber. That gamble set up exactly the showdown everyone wanted: Reddick and van Gisbergen, side by side for the win with the laps winding down.
Van Gisbergen applied pressure as the gap closed, but Reddick’s car rotated cleanly through COTA’s technical sections and pulled away confidently on the straights. The margin stabilized, then grew, and Reddick crossed the line roughly four seconds clear for the win. “It means the world,” Reddick said afterward, climbing from his No. 45 Toyota. “It’s so fitting. We got going at the end of the race, I’m leading and there’s SVG, the guy I’ve been trying to beat for a while now. To be able to outlast him there and hold on for the win is just incredible.”
Why Three Wins in a Row Means More Than It Sounds
Winning Daytona takes drafting discipline. Winning Atlanta takes survival instincts and timing. Winning a road course like COTA takes technical precision and tire management, a completely different skill set from the other two. Reddick has now shown all three in three consecutive weekends, and that combination is exactly why no NASCAR driver had ever opened a season with three straight wins before this.
It’s just as significant for 23XI Racing, co-owned by Michael Jordan and Denny Hamlin. The team is now the first organization to sweep a season’s opening three Cup races since Petty Enterprises did it back in 1963, a comparison that puts this start in genuinely historic company rather than just a hot streak.
What Comes Next
Christopher Bell finished third behind Reddick and van Gisbergen, with Ty Gibbs, Michael McDowell, Kyle Larson, Chase Elliott, Blaney, AJ Allmendinger, and Hamlin rounding out the top ten. But three races in, the standings are effectively a formality: Reddick sits comfortably atop the championship, and for 23XI Racing, this stretch validates years of investment in talent and infrastructure. If Reddick keeps this pace up, the conversation is going to move well past “historic start” before the season is even a quarter of the way done.
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