Through the gears: Tyler Reddick survives, Chase Elliott resurfaces and Bubba Wallace berates himself

Go figure, COTA couldn't provide a coda.

It took three overtime attempts for the racing gods to finally give Tyler Reddick the win. Oh, and Chase Elliott participated in the broadcast.

Those were the highlights. Everything else?

Ugh.

NASCAR was up against two NCAA Elite Eight games as well as the WGC Match Play and if viewers thought to surf in Fox’s direction, they were likely to see a bunch of cars resembling a Chik-Fil-A drive thru, with caution laps at the 3.426-mile behemoth seemingly lasting for days.

When the green flag dropped, the yellow was right behind it as a hairpin at the end of a long straight stretch turned into a five-wide mosh pit.

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Elliott smiled and was in good spirits throughout, but among those who survived the melee, other than Reddick, all they cracked was a beer.

Here’s a look at Sunday and an early glimpse at this week’s race at Richmond.

First gear

Bubba Wallace wasn’t around for the late fireworks but wasn't any happier.

He bowed out on lap 11 after locking up the breaks and slamming into Kyle Larson. It was his fifth DNF in the last seven road-course races.

Afterward, he didn’t mince words, pointing his frustration squarely at himself.

“Just trying my hardest not to go down that slippery slope of self-doubt here,” Wallace said. “Two weeks in a row making rookie mistakes. Six years in Cup? Need to be replaced.”

Second gear

After running in the top five nearly all day, Daniel Suarez was a casualty of the overtime disarray, fading to 27^th after being pinballed by Alex Bowman into Martin Truex in the first, sharp left-hander.

The situation was caused by Bowman being hit by Ross Chastain, who was bumped by Chase Briscoe, thus illustrating the fracases that erupted with each restart attempt.

Afterward, Suarez looked for answers wherever he could find them, dumping Chastain on the cool-down lap to get to Bowman’s bumper on pit road. Conversations with both drivers ensued with Suarez and Chastain, teammates at Trackhouse Racing, clearly heated with each other.

“I just hate that I race people aggressive, clean and then I get dumped like that,” Suarez said.

Third gear

Back to Reddick. It marked the third road-course win in the last five events and Sunday’s might have been the most impressive of them all.

Not only did Reddick survive and hold off the field three times, he pitted an extra time and still won the race. And he did it in a Toyota, which struggled at road races in 2022.

With Elliott and AJ Allmendinger coming up empty at road courses in 2022, Reddick is clearly the King of the Road. For now.

Fourth gear

Some trends for Richmond:

◾ In the last five races, Joe Gibbs Racing has the three best average finishers with Martin Truex (3.8), Denny Hamlin (4.2) and Christopher Bell (6) registering a combined 11 top fives, 13 top 10s and a pair of wins.

◾ Kevin Harvick nearly had the sweep last year, finishing second in the spring race and winning in the summer.

◾ Austin Dillon is sneaky good on the three-quarter-mile tri-oval, finishing in the top 10 in three of the last five races and carrying an average finish of 10.2 over that span, making Richmond his second-best track.

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: NASCAR: Chaos at COTA, Tyler Reddick rolls and Chase Elliott returns?