NASCAR insiders make pick for Cup Series regular season championship with two races left

The NASCAR Cup Series regular season is winding down, which means a regular season champion will be crowned soon. On The Teardown podcast, Jordan Bianchi and Jeff Gluck of The Athletic talked about how Tyler Reddick has the best chance to win the NASCAR regular season title.

“Really underrated on superspeedways. He won at Talladega earlier this year,” Bianchi said. “Toyota’s really good at forming a strategy. We saw that in the spring Talladega race of these drivers, that will benefit Denny Hamlin as well. But Tyler’s good at positioning in these races, runs these races well.

“Also, going to Darlington, and if go back to the spring, who was one of the fastest cars there? Tyler Reddick. Arguably, that was one of the races this year out of a few that Tyler should have won. Got into Chris Buescher late, didn’t happen but they have speed. How these last two races set up really really well for Tyler Reddick to get a lot of points and frankly pick up another win here.”

Gluck also shared his thoughts on Reddick and said he has had him No. 1 in his NASCAR power rankings for “a while.” Gluck went on to share what Reddick has done this season, including seven straight top-10 finishes.

“This guy is riding a real hot streak and yet as you alluded to, he’s still sort of under the radar oddly,” Gluck said.

Reddick won the FireKeepers Casino 400 at Michigan International Speedway on Monday to claim his second victory of the year. Not only that, Reddick is the points leader, giving him the best chance to win the NASCAR regular season championship.

“It was a pretty chaotic race for us going into the night. We had a bad restart. Just didn’t really know where we were going to stack up. But I think we had a good sense of direction of what we needed to do going into today’s race when we knew what our plan was going to be coming down pit road for the first time,” Reddick said during his post-race press conference.

“I think we made good adjustments on the car all day. It wasn’t really a smooth day. We made some mistakes on pit road, put us in a bad spot going into stage three. Put us right behind the wreck, which was just lucky guess. We had some good restarts after that, passing cars, getting close to the front. Obviously, we had to take a little more fuel on the 9 and some of those guys. We just had to go up there and pass them back.”