As Nascar’s Kurt Busch Writes His Final Chapter, Tyler Reddick Starts His Next One

As NASCAR champion Kurt Busch prepares for another chapter, perhaps the final one, of his long racing career, driver Tyler Reddick will also be starting a new chapter in his racing career.

It’s a chapter that will begin being written a little sooner than originally planned.

Saturday Busch announced that he will be stepping away from fulltime racing in 2023. The 44-year-old has certainly been looking towards the sunset of his career in the last few years. But a concussion he suffered during a crash during qualifying in July put him on the sidelines. With his recovery still ongoing, Busch elected to move up his retirement plans, though he left the door open to racing in NASCAR, and other forms of motorsports on a part time basis.

The move was the first domino in a row that had teams scrambling behind the scenes. Because Busch stepping away opens a seat on the 23XI Racing team where Busch has raced since 2020. That seat belongs to Tyler Reddick.

Earlier this season, Reddick announced, much to the surprise of his current team Richard Childress Racing and the rest of NASCAR, that he had signed to race for 23XI Racing starting in 2024. There was speculation that Busch might retire after next season, opening the seat for Reddick. That left Reddick in a sort of limbo for 2023 as he was still under contract at RCR.

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The waters became even murkier in September when Childress announced that they had signed Kurt’s younger brother Kyle to a contract to race the car Reddick now occupies. Team owner Richard Childress said at the time that they would find a seat for Reddick at the team for 2023, though what that would be remained a mystery.

With Kurt Busch’s announcement, that mystery is now solved.

At nearly the same moment as Kurt started his press conference, 23XI and RCR issued statements confirming that the final year of Reddick’s contract had been bought out, and he will now move to 23XI Racing a year earlier than planned.

“Their discussions, I had no part of, it was directly between 23XI and RCR,’’ Reddick said. “It was between those two and they came to an agreement and worked it out so that I get started a year early.

“Unfortunately, Kurt’s situation is what brought this opportunity about, which is a tough thing. It’s tough and I really hate to see that for him. But he’s a team player and I’ve seen that in his time outside the car.’’

Reddick insists he will continue to give his all to the RCR team in the four races they have remaining together. He proved that by winning the pole at Las Vegas a few hours after the Busch press conference.

“Certainly, it is nice to know – like, ‘hey, this is what the future is going to hold’,” he said. “I’m going to get to go over there earlier than I planned and just start working on those things that myself and a lot of the ownership over there talked about wanting to do and why we wanted to get together. We just get a year earlier start on that and that is very exciting for me.

“I’m excited in a weird way for all of the things that we’re going to have in front of us. In a weird way, it’s always been really fun for me to put a lot of work into something like I have at RCR and see how much has come out of it. So, I’m really excited to do that again and do that at 23XI.”

The question of where he will be racing, or if he would be racing, in 2023 has now been answered. That leaves Reddick free of the anxieties that could have slowed him on track, though two of his three wins came after his 23XI Racing announcement in July which could have proven at least one thing:

“It wasn’t a distraction at all, honestly,” he said.