Tyler Reddick did not so much win the DAYTONA 500 as he stole it in plain sight. For 199 laps on Sunday at Daytona International Speedway, the Great American Race belonged to everyone else, with the lead swapping hands in dizzying fashion and what felt like half the field taking a turn at the front. Names flashed across the scoring pylon, lanes formed and dissolved, and chaos kept lurking just behind the lead pack. In the final 500 yards of the 68th running of the DAYTONA 500, though, Reddick picked his moment, trusted his teammate, and finally delivered the kind of finish Michael Jordan and Denny Hamlin hired him for.
When he got there, he had led exactly one lap—the one that mattered. After a winless 2025 season and a very public set of expectations hanging over his No. 45 23XI Racing Toyota, it felt less like a fluke and more like an overdue payment. On a day when an army of drivers officially led at least one lap and the lead changed hands over and over, Reddick only needed one clean shot. He took it when the entire sport was watching.
One Shot, One Lap, One Win
Coming to the checkered flag, Carson Hocevar’s underdog story had already unraveled in Turn 1, and what had been a poised charge to the finish suddenly turned into survival. Hocevar, out front at the white flag, spun in Turn 1 and collected Erik Jones and Michael McDowell, blowing apart the lead pack and tossing the race into the kind of late‑lap chaos Daytona has become famous for. When the dust cleared from that first incident, Chase Elliott slipped into control, and for a few precious seconds, it looked like the sport’s most popular driver was about to finally grab his own slice of Great American Race glory.
But superspeedway racing never allows anyone at the front to relax for long. As Elliott and Zane Smith tried to manage the air and control the lines, Riley Herbst latched onto the back bumper of Reddick’s Toyota and started building a run that would decide everything. Off Turn 4, Herbst gave Reddick the kind of push every driver dreams of and every spotter prays for, a perfectly timed surge that launched the 45 past Elliott and into clean air at exactly the right moment. Behind them, Herbst tried to protect his own chance with an aggressive block on Brad Keselowski near the outside wall, triggering a sideways, sliding tangle of cars across the finish line while Reddick sprinted away to a narrow victory over Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
He was officially the 25th different leader of the afternoon, a number that set a DAYTONA 500 record. The only lap he led was the last one, making his stat line almost comical: one lap out front, one Harley J. Earl Trophy. For a driver who had watched William Byron deny him a Daytona win one year earlier and had gone 38 races without a victory, that single lap might be the most important of his career.
The Weight Of Expectations
Reddick did not pretend the last year had been anything but a grind. Driving for a team co‑owned by Hamlin, a three‑time DAYTONA 500 winner, and Jordan, whose competitive standards are carved into basketball history, there is no such thing as a quiet slump. In that environment, a winless season feels like a siren, and a driver with Reddick’s résumé—two Xfinity titles, multiple Cup wins, and elite raw speed—is expected to cash in more often than not. Every week that went by without a checkered flag only turned up the heat.
“Last year was really hard for all of us, hard for me,” Reddick said, laying it out plainly. “When you’re a Cup driver, and you get to this level and drive for Michael Jordan, it’s expected you win every single year.” A 38‑race drought will force any team to re‑evaluate, and Reddick described an offseason spent staring in the mirror, dissecting strategy and execution, and trying to make sure that when opportunities came late in races, they’d be ready to finish. After Sunday, that work no longer feels theoretical.
They still were not perfect in the 500. Reddick admitted there were stretches when they “weren’t making decisions we wanted to,” moments when strategy or positioning required hitting the reset button and swallowing frustration. But each reset kept the 45 in the conversation, kept it in draft lanes that mattered, and allowed the team to survive when others got caught in the blender of pack racing. When Herbst’s push finally arrived on the last lap, it was the product of a day spent refusing to let the race get away from them entirely.
The emotional release afterward matched the size of the moment. “Just speechless,” Reddick said of finally winning the one race every driver circles. “I didn’t know if I’d ever win this race. It’s surreal, honestly. The best part is my son asked before this race, ‘Are you finally going to win this race?’ Something about today just felt right.” For a 30‑year‑old Californian who had already finished second in this event but never held the trophy, it felt like a checkpoint he had been chasing for years.
Elliott’s Agony On Defense
If Reddick’s win felt improbable, Elliott’s loss felt cruel. The No. 9 Chevrolet had been part of the action all afternoon, and when Hocevar’s spin and the ensuing accident cleared a path, Elliott found himself in that most treacherous of positions at Daytona: leading late, with hungry cars stacking up behind him. He and Smith managed to separate briefly from the rest of the pack, with Smith giving him a strong shove down the backstretch and into Turn 3, and for a heartbeat, Elliott looked poised to finally snag his first DAYTONA 500.
He could sense what was coming even before he saw it. Elliott talked afterward about feeling the momentum shift, about knowing another massive run had to be forming behind them. Once Reddick and Herbst began that charge, the math turned quickly against the leader. At a track where the draft rules everything, being the first car can feel like standing still when a line two‑wide comes barreling up on you with energy to spend. Suddenly, Elliott was no longer attacking; he was guessing.
“Unfortunately, that was accurate, and then at that point in time, you’re just on defense,” Elliott said of that final sequence. “Man, that’s a really, really tough place to be, truthfully.” He admitted that, in hindsight, his mind immediately went to the “what if” scenarios—could a more aggressive double block have cut off Reddick’s lane and held the lead?—but he did not sound convinced that decision would have ended with anything but a crash that ruined both of their days. Instead, Elliott wound up watching Reddick drive away and had to settle for fourth behind Stenhouse and Joey Logano, another brutal near‑miss in a race that keeps finding fresh ways to test him.
Keselowski’s Frustration And The Earlier Big One
For Brad Keselowski, the DAYTONA 500 turned into a mix of painful déjà vu and raw frustration. Still chasing his first win in this race after a long list of close calls, he climbed into his Ford with a still‑healing broken right femur, gutting it out physically just to have a chance. Late in the race, that chance looked real. He had shoved William Byron hard on the final restart, trying to jolt the outside lane to life, and even when that did not immediately pay off, he managed to build one last, monster run in the closing seconds.
Then Herbst moved up to block, and everything unraveled. Keselowski called the late move “really stupid,” pointing to the damage it caused not just to his own shot but to Elliott, Logano, and several others who he felt “didn’t deserve to be wrecked.” For a driver who has built his career on understanding plate racing better than most, to get wiped out in someone else’s desperate play left him with a top‑five finish that felt more like a reminder of what got away. There is a particular kind of sting that comes with leaving Daytona knowing you had the speed and never got the clean air to show it.
As wild as the finish was, it still had competition for the day’s biggest wreck. With seven laps to go in Stage 2, Justin Allgaier was leading the top lane when he left a narrow seam of daylight open to his right. Hamlin tried to slide into that hole, Allgaier’s car twitched toward the wall, and the contact between the two triggered a 20‑car pileup in the tri‑oval that shredded a good portion of the field. In an instant, dreams for a dozen teams were turned into crumpled sheet metal.
Allgaier owned the mistake. He admitted he thought he had blocked enough to control the lane, thought the top would fall in behind him, and instead watched as one misjudgment lit the fuse. “It’s a hundred percent my fault,” he said, adding that sometimes you get complacent and think you’ve checked every box when you haven’t. Herbst’s car was listed in that mess, but the damage was more cosmetic than catastrophic. He and his team patched it up enough to continue, and that resilience proved to be one of the hidden turning points of the afternoon. Without Herbst still able to push, there is no last‑lap surge for Reddick and no signature win for 23XI.
Jordan’s Teamwork And A Historic Stat Line
That is exactly the way Jordan saw it. The Hall of Famer is still relatively new to NASCAR ownership compared to the lifers in the garage, but he sounded every bit like a seasoned team boss when he broke down the final lap. “I thought Riley did an unbelievable job pushing at the end,” Jordan said. “That shows you what teamwork can really, really do. He doesn’t get enough credit. He won’t get enough credit. But we feel the love. We understand exactly what he did.” For a man who built his legend on elevating teammates, seeing a push like that decide the biggest race in stock car racing had to hit a familiar note.
Jordan talked about “hanging in there all day,” tipping his cap to the strategy calls that kept his cars relevant deep into the race. When Reddick finally crossed the line, delivering the first DAYTONA 500 win for 23XI and the tenth overall Cup victory for the organization, Jordan compared the feeling to winning a championship and joked that he would not fully process it until he had his ring. For a team that has been steadily climbing the ladder since its debut, Sunday felt like a statement that it belongs on the sport’s biggest stage, not just as a curiosity with a famous owner but as a true heavyweight.
The numbers back that up. The race ran just under three and a half hours, featured only a handful of cautions, and produced one of the most statistically wild lead‑change charts the event has ever seen. Bubba Wallace led a race‑high 40 laps and won Stage 2 under caution from the Allgaier‑Hamlin wreck, Smith grabbed the first stage win of his Cup career, and 37 of the 41 cars in the field were involved in some form of incident. Byron’s bid for a third straight DAYTONA 500 victory stalled out in 12th, and pole‑sitter Kyle Busch came home 15th after trading the lead multiple times and dodging trouble all afternoon.
On a day dominated by movement—up front, mid‑pack, and through the running order—Reddick’s line on the results sheet almost looks like a misprint. One lap led, one win. But that is the nature of Daytona. You do not get extra credit for time spent out front. You get remembered for where you are when the checkered flag waves. For Reddick and 23XI, that final lap ends a drought, answers a son’s pre‑race question, and plants their banner squarely in Victory Lane at the Great American Race. On a night when the whole sport watched, and nearly the entire field took turns in harm’s way, Tyler Reddick finally got his—and he did it with the kind of finish that will live on every time the Daytona highlights roll.
