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Tyler Reddick wins 2018 Xfinity Series title

Nick Bromberg
·College football and motorsports writer

Tyler Reddick bookended the 2018 Xfinity Series season with wins. And it makes him a champion.

Reddick beat Cole Custer to the finish line to claim the season championship Saturday at Homestead for his second win of the season. Reddick won the first race of the season at Daytona by inches to get the victory over teammate Elliott Sadler. He can at least say he won by seconds on Saturday.

Reddick was ahead of Custer thanks to a bad decision by Custer’s team on the final round of pit stops. Like the Truck Series race Friday night, there were no cautions in Saturday’s race outside from the cautions at the end of stages one and two. That meant the race’s final stops in the third stage were under green and Reddick’s team was one of the first to pit.

Custer’s team waited a handful of laps to bring him to pit road. That was costly at a track like Homestead where tires fall off very quickly. Custer was seven seconds back of the lead after his pit stop and while he closed to within a second of Reddick at one point he never seriously challenged for the win.

Reddick’s race-winning pass came on lap 163 of the 200-lap race when he passed fellow title challenger Christopher Bell. Bell fell back after the pass and ended up a nonfactor at the end after a flat tire. He did a heck of a job preventing his car from spinning in the late laps because of the flat tire and prevented a potentially race-altering caution from happening.

Daniel Hemric, the fourth driver competing for the title, finished fourth.

It’s the second-straight Xfinity Series title for JR Motorsports. William Byron won in 2017 and moved up to the No. 24 car for Hendrick Motorsports in the Cup Series. Reddick is leaving the team too. He’s taking over Hemric’s car for Richard Childress Racing in the Xfinity Series. Hemric, who has never won a Camping World Truck Series or Xfinity Series race despite being a perennial contender, is moving up to take Ryan Newman’s place at RCR in the Cup Series.

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Nick Bromberg is a writer for Yahoo Sports.

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