Each week, The Athletic asks the same 12 questions to a different race car driver. Up next: 23XI Racing’s Tyler Reddick, who opens the Chase for the Cup as the No. 3 seed after winning a series-high five races during the regular season. This interview has been edited and condensed, but the full version is available on the 12 Questions Podcast.1. Do you typically arrive for things early, late or on time, and why?Over the last couple months, it’s gotten a lot better. Just feeling like I’m waking up with more energy and, from that side of things, being in a much better space. I feel like getting better sleep has helped me recently with some of that stuff. I’m not getting as foggy or running low on my battery, if you will, midday.That’s because you addressed your sleep apnea? (Reddick was diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea earlier this year and started a CPAP treatment.)Ryan Preece survives chaotic overtime finish to win at Daytona It’s helped out a lot. I was so used to waking up in the morning just flustered because I couldn’t wake up. I couldn’t think. The old me, as crazy as it sounds, was better off staying up until 1 or 2 in the morning packing everything before I went to bed. Then I’d be like, “I guess I’m just not going to shower when I wake up. I’m just going to get in my car and go and try to wake up as I drive.”Now it’s not that big of a deal. … Probably the most beneficial thing overall is my wife has reminded me I’m a much better person when I wake up now compared to how grumpy I was in the past.2. What is the pettiest thing that annoys you during a race weekend?When you’re out there running practice laps and you’ve either been patient and waited a minute or two at the end of pit lane, or you did a really good job gapping yourself to have a clean hole on the racetrack. Then somebody comes out of the pits right in front of you and plugs that hole.As simple as that sounds, if you want to piss me off, that’s the best way to do it. Just pull out in front of me in practice. You better have a tire advantage. You better drive away if you’re going to do that. You would think somebody spit in my face when they pull out in front of me, I get so mad.3. What is something you’ve learned to stop explaining to people?I’m not good at that one. I think I still over-explain. …I feel like as I explain something, sometimes maybe I miss a detail or two. Then occasionally I’ll just start over and say it all again with that extra detail instead of just adding the detail in.My wife reminds me of this. She’ll be like, “You don’t have to explain this to me. We’ve lived together more than half our lives.”4. If you could go back to the early days before you reached NASCAR, what is one different decision you wish you had made?I would’ve handled the hard stretches in racing a little bit differently, arguably better than I did then. I probably would’ve embraced the challenge differently.I think I could’ve handled some of the dry spells differently and maybe won more races than I did, or just snapped out of it faster.Says Tyler Reddick of his penchant for overexplaining in debriefs: “Bubba (Wallace) is sitting there like, ‘Dude, just shut up. It’s my turn. Move on.'” (Sean Gardner / Getty Images)5. What is it like to be in a debrief after a bad race?I try to make my bad debriefs as useful as my good ones. Dave (Rogers, 23XI’s competition director) picks who goes in what order from week to week; we mix it up. If I’ve said my piece first and the other drivers are explaining their stuff, I like to jump in and ask questions.The earlier question about over-explaining fits into this pretty well. I feel like I can go on and on for quite a while about things that happened with the car over the weekend. Bubba (Wallace) is sitting there like, “Dude, just shut up. It’s my turn. Move on.”6. I’m asking each driver a pair of wild-card questions, one about the past and one about the present. In terms of the past, during the 2020 12 Questions interview, you revealed yourself as one of the biggest coffee fanatics in the garage. How has your relationship with coffee evolved since we talked about it in 2020?Still very bougie. I like my Jura coffee maker. I’ve had one that my dad gave me when I moved to North Carolina. … Funny enough, I still have that one on my current bus. It’s still running strong. This machine probably has 20 years of use on it, and it’s still running strong while bouncing up and down the road in the motorhome.Riley (Herbst) and I went half-and-half on a newer model that now lives on the 45 hauler. That’s been really good. It’s funny because some of the old-school guys are like, “How do we work this thing?” I’m like, “There’s a power button in the back. Press it. Then there’s a touchscreen that tells you what it makes.”Then at home, I (have) the biggest, baddest machine they made at the time. It has two coffee-bean chambers, and you can blend two different coffee beans together into one cup. … I think you can make 20 or 25 cups before the water reservoir runs out.7. As far as the present, after such a difficult second half of the regular season, how are you approaching the Chase?As crazy as it sounds, even when we finished fourth in the Coca-Cola 600 (in May), we wanted more. That was a super disappointing result for us. Then we went to Nashville, and I think we ran seventh or eighth, and we were mad. We started taking for granted all the good things we were still doing in a day that would get us a top-10.Then before we knew it, we were having critical failures. Whether they were our fault, getting caught up in somebody else’s stuff or mechanical issues. I should’ve been more thankful for some of those mediocre back-half-of-the-top-10 days.But the positive is that in every situation where we’ve finished 30th or worse, multiple laps down or DNF’d, the fight the team has shown leading up to that moment or after it has continued to be really rock solid. We can go back and look at the results and say, “Dang, bad day, bad day, bad day.” But inside those races, there were still a lot of really good decisions. There was a lot of fight.Tyler Reddick won five times in the season’s first nine races but has had more finishes of 25th or worse (6) than top fives (5) since. (David Jensen / Getty Images)8. If you could get any driver’s helmet in the history of motorsports, whose would it be?I’m going to go with Tim Richmond’s Old Milwaukee helmet. I ran that throwback a number of years ago when I was at JR Motorsports. So it would be really cool to have that helmet next to my throwback helmet.9. When things are not going well, do you prefer people leave you alone or check in on you?I’d say neither one. Both are bad. People being scared to talk to you isn’t going to help anything.I’ve tried to really understand and embrace this: It’s OK to not be OK. If we come in after a really bad day and somebody tries to tell you, “It’s OK. What happened will be alright,” it’s like, no. It’s not OK. We’re better than this. We shouldn’t have been in that situation in the first place.Don’t run away from the problems. It’s OK to have catastrophically bad things happen and address it and say, “Alright, what can we do to make sure this doesn’t happen again?” instead of just brushing it over and saying, “It’s fine. We’ll get them next week.”10. What is something about yourself that would surprise people who think they know you?I had this sim setup with a computer where iRacing ran fine, but I decided I wanted to build the best computer possible. I’d never built a computer before, so last year I got all the parts and built it myself in a big Corsair full tower. It’s huge. Then (youngest son) Rookie was born (in 2025), and other things were going on, so I didn’t really have time to keep working on it.About a week after I built it, my cat Tux was laying on top of it where the fans and the cooler are — she was laying there because it’s a heat source — and she threw up on it.Cat vomit is super acidic. I caught it and powered it off. I’m like, “I’m going to clean this thing one day.” Then Rookie got sick, life kept happening, we were trying to fix 2025.… Damn near a year went by. Finally, I had a week that was slightly calm enough and thought, “I’ll finally clean this computer.” Which is crazy considering the money I put into it, but that’s how life has been recently. I don’t have hours of free time after the kids go to bed.So I finally cleaned the whole thing up and got it running again. Now I’m putting it into a desk; the desk is getting built for it.11. What is something you laugh about now that was absolutely not funny at the time?I’d say me and Germán Quiroga at Pocono, a lifetime ago when I was part-time (in the Truck Series in 2014).I was being really aggressive passing through the Tunnel Turn, got a little loose and washed up into him, used him up a little bit. He got in the wall, and that pissed him off, so he right-hooked me and spun me driver-side into the wall in the short chute. Naturally, I didn’t appreciate that. I did use him up, but damn, dude, I didn’t need to get right-hooked for that.We came to pit road, fixed it up and were both lined up at the back of the Truck field for a restart. We were driving through the backmarkers and made it to Turn 2. I got to his back bumper and missed him, but when I missed him, I washed up into one of Tyler Young’s trucks. The driver had to back out of it pretty hard and whacked the fence. So I tore up Tyler’s truck, which was really bad.Then seconds later, as the yellow was coming out (for Young’s truck), I was on Germán’s right-rear. I basically crashed him the same way he crashed me — but the yellow came out once I was already committed to getting even (which NASCAR viewed as wrecking under caution).So yeah, I got parked. It was serious. I don’t even know if all the names and faces who were in the NASCAR hauler that day are still part of NASCAR, but I remember them saying, “If you ever do anything that stupid again, you’ll never drive in NASCAR ever again.”… Where I really put the nail in the coffin was after I got even and crashed him, I keyed up on the radio and said, “I hope that wasn’t too obvious.” Just like a total idiot. If I wasn’t going to get parked before, I pretty much sealed my fate with that.12. Each week, I ask a driver to give me a question for the next interview. The last person was Kyle Larson and he says: “Do you have a better chance of scoring one basket on prime Michael Jordan in 100 possessions, or lapping him 50 times in a 100-lap race at Bristol?”That’s a wack question. He put some really good thought into that one.It would be absolutely impossible for me to get a single basket out of 100 against prime MJ one-on-one. Now, I know Michael says “I’m not a racer” or whatever, but I think he’s underselling it a little bit. I think he’d do pretty damn good at Bristol.I guess I’d have to go with the car one. My only hope is maybe he gets in there a little hot and crashes.The next interview is with Ryan Blaney. Do you have a question I can ask him?How has being a father changed your life? How has being a father benefited you in ways you didn’t expect, and what are some things you’ve cut out or unexpectedly lost along the way, like hobbies or anything else?