AVONDALE, Ariz. (AP) — The flipside to Tyler Reddick taking Michael Jordan to victory lane in NASCAR's first three races this season is teammate Bubba Wallace feels a bit left out of the euphoria surrounding 23XI Racing.
Reddick set a NASCAR record in winning the first three races of the season, the Daytona 500, at Atlanta and last weekend on the road course in Austin, Texas, with Jordan in attendance, and the Pro Basketball Hall of Famer will be at Phoenix Raceway on Sunday when Reddick goes for four in a row.
The success has 23XI Racing buzzing and Reddick and Wallace are 1-2 in the Cup Series standings. Wallace can find solace in how he's running — he had chances to win at Daytona and Atlanta — but is still disappointed the wins have gone solely to Reddick.
The difference between the Toyota teammates, Wallace joked, is that Reddick inherited the mythical lucky horseshoe Jimmie Johnson had for seven Cup championships.
“You know, Tyler's been driving his (butt) off, simple as that, I couldn't be more proud of him and the way he's turned around from his (winless) season from last year,” Wallace said. “It's been pretty cool to witness that. I wish it was our team.”
Reddick can empathize with Wallace and noted he had a tinge of jealousy last season when Wallace won the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis as Reddick was slumping.
“I've experienced it other places that I've raced and feel like I contended to win, didn't win and teammates did, so I understand where he probably would be with that part of it,” Reddick said. “I think he's doing a good job of remaining positive and it's a good start to the year for him.”
Reddick and Wallace are winless at Phoenix. Reddick was third in 2023 and 2024, while Wallace has an average finish of 20th and failed to finish either race at Phoenix last year.
Anthony Alfredo has spent hundreds of hours over the past four years inside a racing simulator doing test work for Hendrick Motorsports.
That thankless job has finally led to a breakthrough opportunity driving in a Cup Series race for NASCAR's winningest team. Alex Bowman will miss Sunday's race and Alfredo was pulled from the bullpen to drive the No. 48 Chevrolet.
It will be Alfredo's first Cup start of the season — he qualified for the Daytona 500 driving for tiny Beard Motorsports, but his car was disqualified and kicked out of the field. Alfredo has 43 career Cup starts for smaller teams so Sunday will be the best car he's ever driven.
Bowman had to give up his seat during last weekend's race in Texas and has since been diagnosed with vertigo. It's left Alfredo with mixed feelings.
“It’s just weird, right? I don’t want to see anyone in the position Alex is in, so it’s hard for me to be excited,” Alfredo said. “That makes it certainly disappointing, because a lot of people are asking me how excited I am, and I’m not excited that I have to fill in for someone who’s not able to be in their own car this weekend.
“But it is, of course, a huge opportunity for me to go out there and do a good job and maybe turn some heads, but I don’t even feel like I have to prove anything to anybody. Honestly, I don’t think they would have picked me if they didn’t think I could do it right, so it’s not about that. I think it’s more going out there and just do what’s asked of me and doing a good job behind the wheel filling in.”
AJ Allmendinger had to be medically treated after last week's race in Austin, Texas, when his cool suit failed and caused Allmendinger to overheat while driving.
He collapsed on pit road after exiting his car.
“Cool suits are a tough thing because they are not designed in our environment to fail,” said Brad Keselowski. “So when they fail, it's fairly devastating.”
A cool suit is a specialized, liquid-cooled garment meant to prevent heat stroke and manage core temperatures in extreme environments. It circulates chilled water through tubes embedded in a shirt or vest, connected to a small cooler box.
William Byron said the suits can be hit-or-miss, and when one fails, it is miserable for the driver.
“Definitely when it works, it’s great. But I feel like there’s definitely a handful, if not more times, that it doesn’t work,” Byron said. “That shirt is very insulated. I was at a Martinsville test one time and was wearing it and didn’t turn it on for most of the day and just started to feel sick because just the way it insulates your body and kind of has the opposite effect when it’s not on.”
Byron teammate Kyle Larson said he was trying a different cooling system this weekend at Phoenix. He planned to use the version teammate Chase Elliott has been wearing in which a pad connects to the core and a fan pushes cool air in.
Ryan Blaney, winner at Phoenix in November's season finale, is the BetMGM favorite at +475. Blaney has 10 top-five finishes in 20 career starts here. ... Joe Gibbs Racing drivers have led 56% of the laps — most of every team — in each of the past four races at Phoenix. But this season the organization has opened with an average finish of 21st, their worst opening three races since 2017. ... All three Spire Motorsports cars are currently inside the top 10 in Cup points, while none of the 4 JGR cars is inside the top 16. JGR is suing Spire and former competition director Chris Gabehart in federal court.
AP auto racing: https://apnews.com/hub/auto-racing
23XI Racing co-owner Michael Jordan, left, reacts with Bubba Wallace, right, after a NASCAR Cup Series auto race, Sunday, Feb. 22, 2026, in Hampton, Ga. (AP Photo/Colin Hubbard)
Team co-owner Michael Jordan celebrates by 23XI Racing's Tyler Reddick during a NASCAR Cup Series auto race in Austin, Texas, Sunday, March 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Stephen Spillman)
23XI Racing's Bubba Wallace, right, congratulates teammate Tyler Reddick on his win during a NASCAR Cup Series auto race in Austin, Texas, Sunday, March 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Stephen Spillman)
NEW YORK (AP) — Ted Turner, a brash and outspoken television pioneer who raced yachts, owned huge chunks of the American West and transformed the news business by launching CNN in 1980, has died at age 87.
The network reported Turner died Wednesday, citing a news release from Turner Enterprises.
Turner owned professional sports teams in Atlanta, defended the America’s Cup in yachting in 1977 and donated a stunning $1 billion to United Nations charities. He married three women — most famously actor Jane Fonda — and earned the nicknames “Captain Outrageous” and “The Mouth of the South.”
He once bragged: “If only I had a little humility, I’d be perfect.”
He was slowed in later years by Lewy Body Dementia. Long since out of the television business, he concentrated on philanthropy and his more than 2 million acres of property, including the nation’s largest bison herd.
His garrulous personality sometimes overshadowed a driven, risk-taking business acumen. By the time he sold his Turner Broadcasting System to Time Warner Inc. in a 1996 media megadeal, Turner had turned his late father’s billboard company into a global conglomerate that included seven major cable networks, three professional sports teams and a pair of hit movie studios.
Turner’s signature achievement was creating CNN, the first 24-hour, all-news television network in 1980. At a time news is instantly available at anyone’s fingertips, it’s hard to recall that the idea of letting consumers decide when they choose to learn what’s going on in the world was once revolutionary.
In part, Turner’s own frustration with television news was the instigator. He often worked past 8 p.m., after the ABC, CBS and NBC nightly newscasts had already gone off the air, and was in bed by the time his local stations did their own newscasts at 11 p.m.
He took a chance by starting the operation sometimes derided as the “chicken noodle network” in the early days of cable television, living in an apartment above its Atlanta office.
“I was going to have to hit hard and move incredibly fast and that’s what we did — move so fast that the (broadcast) networks wouldn’t have the time to respond, because they should have done this, not me,” Turner recalled in a 2016 interview with the Academy of Achievement. “But they didn’t have the imagination.”
CNN’s breakthrough moment came during the Gulf War with Iraq in 1991. Most television journalists had fled Baghdad, warned of an imminent American attack. CNN stayed, capturing arresting images of a war’s outbreak, with anti-aircraft tracers streaking across the sky and correspondents flinching from the concussion of bombs.
Turner was promised a continued role in CNN after his company’s sale to Time Warner for $7.3 billion in stock, but was gradually pushed out, much to his regret.
“I made a mistake,” he later said. “The mistake I made was losing control of the company.”
That same year — 1996 — saw the birth of Fox News Channel and arrival of a new dominant mogul in cable news, Rupert Murdoch. Political opinion became the stock in trade of networks like Fox News and MSNBC. Even though CNN built a worldwide news organizations particularly strong online, it struggles to this day with a diminished desire for straighter TV newscasts.
Robert Edward Turner III was born Nov. 19, 1938, in Cincinnati. When he was 9, his family moved to Savannah, Georgia, where he grew up. After being expelled from Brown University for sneaking a coed into his room, Turner came to Atlanta to work as an account executive for his domineering father’s billboard company, Turner Advertising.
After his father’s 1963 suicide, Turner took over the company. In 1970, he bought an independent UHF station with a weak signal that didn’t even cover Atlanta.
On Dec. 17, 1976, he began transmitting the station to cable systems around the country via satellite. It became the TBS SuperStation. “It was the start of something bigger than we ever imagined,” Turner said in 1996.
TBS’ motley collection of old movies and “The Andy Griffith Show” reruns was augmented by Turner’s acquisition of baseball’s Atlanta Braves. Perennial doormats, the Braves slowly attracted fans across the nation through their superstation exposure and in the 1980s began declaring themselves “America’s Team.”
Turner, who early on donned a uniform and managed one game, helped open baseball’s free-agent price wars by signing pitcher Andy Messersmith.
In the 1980s, Turner went deeply into debt to buy MGM, a move again greeted with skepticism.
But the acquisition gave his company a huge library of vintage movies that eventually were parlayed into the TNT and Turner Classic Movies networks. His devotion to older movies earned Turner a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2004. He was also criticized for adding color to classic movies like “Casablanca,” which he said he did to make them appealing to a younger audience.
TBS also acquired the Hanna-Barbera animation library, which led to the launch of the Cartoon Network.
“He sees the obvious before most people do,” Bob Wright, former president and CEO of NBC, told The New Yorker in 2001. “We all look at the same picture, but Ted sees what you don’t see. And after he sees it, it becomes obvious to everybody.”
He revealed his ambitions as a younger man: “I used to tell people I wanted to become the world’s greatest sailor, businessman and lover all at the same time.”
Asked to share the secret to his success, he said: “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise.”
For much of his life a partying roustabout who wooed beautiful women with a roguish charm, the lean, mustachioed sportsman married three times. He was married to Fonda from 1991 to 2001. She quit acting while married to Turner, but tired of his philandering and divorced him, although they remained friends.
“He was sexy. He was brilliant. He had 2 million acres by the time I left. It would have been easy to stay,” Fonda said of her relationship with Turner.
Turner had an unexpected friendship with Cuban leader Fidel Castro, bonding over hunting and arguments about politics over rum and cigars. A once bitter rival who compared Fox’s Murdoch to Adolf Hitler, they later reconciled over a mutual concern over the environment.
Turner built a sports empire, at one point owning professional baseball, basketball and hockey teams in Atlanta. He was best remembered at the helm of the Atlanta Braves, turning the doormats into postseason regulars by the 1990s. Their stadium, built for the 1996 Olympics, was named Ted Turner Field. The Braves replaced it in 2016 with a newer stadium north of Atlanta.
Perhaps Turner’s greatest love was for the land. He acquired millions of acres in ranches complete with roaming buffalo and was Nebraska’s largest private landholder. He spoke often of reviving the West’s bison herds, and in 2002 started a restaurant chain serving bison burgers, Ted’s Montana Grill. Researchers at Texas A&M University credited his donation of a few bulls in 2005 with helping increase the genetic diversity of the last herd of southern Plains bison.
He had a net worth of $2.5 billion in 2023, but had dropped off Forbes magazine’s ranking of the 400 richest Americans in 2021.
During a stock market bust, Turner’s net worth went from nearly $10 billion to about $2 billion in two-and-a-half years.
“To put this in perspective, I lost nearly $8 billion in 30 months,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Call Me Ted,” in 2008. “That means that, on average, my net worth dropped by about $67 million “per week,” or nearly $10 million “per day, every day, for two and a half years.”
He had enough time, and money, to devote to such lofty goals as promoting world peace and protecting the environment.
“See, my life is more an adventure than a quest to make money. Adventure is going out and doing something for the pure hell of it,” Turner once said. “You just want to see if you can do it, period. There’s no thought of gain other than your own satisfaction.”
Through the years, Turner’s antics occasionally overshadowed his business activities.
Fresh from skippering his boat “Courageous” to the America’s Cup title in 1977, a very inebriated Turner was captured by TV cameras stretched out on the floor at the victory celebration.
Turner managed to insult many with his shoot-from-the-lip style. An atheist since his only sister died of lupus at age 17, he called Christians “losers” and “Jesus-freaks,” later apologizing for both remarks.
He once suggested in a speech that unemployed Black people be used to haul mobile missiles with ropes “like the Egyptians building the pyramids.” After civil rights leaders demanded an apology, he said he was just joking.
Other times, his humor saved him from potentially awkward situations, like when he talked to an audience in Berlin in 1999. “You know, you Germans had a bad century,” Turner said, according to The New Yorker. “You were on the wrong side of two wars. You were the losers. I know what that’s like. When I bought the Atlanta Braves, we couldn’t win, either. You guys can turn it around. You can start making the right choices. If the Atlanta Braves could do it, then Germany can do it.”
Turner, father of five children, grabbed a leadership role in American philanthropy with his Sept. 18, 1997, pledge to give $1 billion, or $100 million a year for 10 years, to United Nations charities. Even as Turner’s fortune shrank after the AOL Time Warner merger, he continued giving money to the U.N., calling it the best hope for peace.
He promoted a range of humanitarian causes. Turner joined former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn to start the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to reducing the threat of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Turner fretted publicly about the world’s problems.
“If I had to predict, the way things are going, I’d say the chances are about 50-50 that humanity will be extinct in 50 years,” Turner said in 2003. “Weapons of mass destruction, disease, I mean this global warming is scaring the living daylights out of me.”
As he poured millions into nonprofits on a global scale, Turner was also fond of spreading his wealth in small ways. He once gave $500 to a volunteer fire department that helped extinguish a blaze on one of his ranches. Another time he lent personal paintings for an exhibit at a Bozeman, Montana, museum.
Former Associated Press correspondent Ryan Nakashima contributed to this report.
FILE - Atlanta Braves owner Ted Turner holds up the World Series trophy on the field at Atlanta Fulton County Stadium after the Braves won the 1995 World Series, Oct. 28, 1995, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/John Bazemore, File)
FILE - Actress and political activist Jane Fonda and media mogul Ted Turner arrive at a party in support of Proposition 128 in Los Angeles on Nov. 6, 1990. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon, File)
FILE - Actress Jane Fonda and CNN founder Ted Turner pose together at the United Nations Foundation Global Leadership Dinner, Nov. 6, 2013, in New York. (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow, File)
FILE - Ted Turner is seen at his desk inside the CNN Center in 1982. (Nancy Mangiafico/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP, File)
FILE - Ted Turner speaks during the CNN World Report Contributors banquet in Atlanta on May 4, 1995. (AP Photo/John Bazemore, File)
