"I knew I wasn’t 100 percent" - Tyler Reddick on his Martinsville crash and data obtained from mouthpieces

In the penultimate and final races of the 2022 NASCAR Cup Series season at Martinsville Speedway, Tyler Reddick made an early exit from the race, completing only 188 of the 500 laps before pulling his #8 car into the garage.

On a restart at the Martinsville race, Reddick ran into the back of Noah Gragson and caused his head to move forward. At about the same time, he rear-ended from behind, forcing his head to smash sharply into the headrest. The #8 driver immediately felt something was wrong with his head and moments later took his car to the garage to retire from the race.

At Phoenix Raceway, Tyler Reddick made the final trip of the 2022 season with reporters before the race and addressed the Martinsville incident. He also revealed that he has been using the data-gathering mouthpiece in each race to help NASCAR gather data to sense what each impact does to the driver's body.

Reddick said:

“It was a restart stack-up and I ran into the back of Noah (Gragson). My head went forward and then while I was in the forward position I got rear-ended and I kind of popped my head back pretty hard on the headrest. Based on what you would see from the mouthpiece-sensor data, it was a bit surprising. It looked like what you would see in a pretty significant crash normally. Didn’t feel good and I knew I wasn’t 100 percent.”

Tyler Reddick also mentioned that he would make the same decision again in the future, even if he was competing for the title in the season finale race.

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Tyler Reddick offers details on using mouthpiece for NASCAR study

Further into the conversation, Tyler Reddick offered a behind-the-scenes look of wearing a mouthpiece as part of a project for the NASCAR study and shared details of why he is volunteering for the project.

Reddick said:

“It’s just good to have that data to kind of see what the differences are. If there are between what the car is picking up on the (incident data recorder) IDR. It’s just one more thing that’s kind of helping everybody gather information and see what’s happening inside the car.”

NASCAR is planning to implement a new rear clip design by next season that could help with the type of impact suffered by Tyler Reddick, Kurt Busch, and Alex Bowman.