Column: Ryan Blaney Has Nashville NASCAR Cup Win In His Rearview, Confidence In His Tank

Column By: HOLLY CAIN / NASCAR – LEBANON, TN – Admittedly, Ryan Blaney considered his victory at Nashville Superspeedway Sunday night almost as much a sigh of relief as it was a rush of celebration.

The 2023 NASCAR Cup Series champion has led races and been ranked among the top-10 in the championship points standings all season only to have strange circumstances and just plain bad luck derail his chance at a trophy hoist.

He’s had five DNFs through the opening 14 races – including three consecutively in March. It’s double the number of any other competitor in the top-15 in the points standings. No one has more in the series.

At Homestead-Miami Speedway, Blaney led 124 of the first 207 laps – more than half the race – when his No. 12 Team Penske Ford suffered an engine problem and he had to retire. At Talladega, Ala. and Charlotte he was collected in a crash not of his own doing.

Yet, he’s had top-five finishes – TOP-FIVE FINISHES – in all but two of the nine other races that he was able to finish. Sunday night at the 1.33-mile Nashville Superspeedway he was finally given the karmic-green flag to make good on the good effort he gave.

And it all bodes well for Blaney and Team Penske as the NASCAR Cup Series moves to Michigan International Speedway for Sunday’s Firekeeper’s Casino 400 (2 p.m. ET on Amazon Prime, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).

“It means a lot because it’s just been pretty rocky this year and had a lot of misfortune and a lot of down times, just crappy things happening to us, and it’s like, man, what do we got to do to just finish these races or close one out and just kind of things go our way,” Blaney said Sunday night.

“So, I think that was more — it’s kind of like, I don’t want to say relief, but just like, okay, finally nothing crazy happened and we were able to just run our own race and bring the speed and execute and do our job very, very well.

“It was nice to finally get in Victory Lane tonight after a rocky start to the year.”

Blaney’s work was obviously a personal triumph – marking his eighth season with at least one win in NASCAR’s big leagues – but it also boldly reminded the field that the reigning NASCAR Cup Series championship Penske organization is on top of things. Again.

The storied team has won the last three NASCAR Cup Series titles with Logano in 2022, Blaney in 2023 and Logano scoring his third in 2024.

And now with the regular season just halfway complete, all three Penske drivers, Blaney, Logano (Texas) and Austin Cindric (Talladega, Ala.) already have victories and therefore Playoff berths – as does Penske’s affiliated team, Wood Brothers Racing with driver Josh Berry (Las Vegas). No other multi-car team has qualified its entire lineup yet.

“I’ve been really proud of Team Penske and the Wood Brothers speed this year so far through the first dozen races,” Blaney said. “For the last couple years, we’ve struggled a little bit kind of getting going before the summer months, and I think we’ve figured it out come the fall and things like that or late summer.

“But I thought we just fired off this year with tons of speed, and was really proud of their efforts over the winter for that and carrying over what we accomplished at the end of last year and bringing it bigger and better at the start of this year.

“So, it’s great to have everybody with a win and everybody locked in there, and hopefully we can just continue to rack it up. It’s nice that we have all the speed and all the teams are working very well together right now. Between myself and the 22, 2, 21, we’re all really in sync right now, and that’s tough to get when all four teams are really communicating great and we’re all playing off each other. That’s a really great thing that we have going on at our race shop.”

The encouraging news for Blaney is that the next races on tap have been good venues for the 31-year old. This week the series moves to the Michigan two-miler, where Blaney won in 2021. The following week the sport holds its first international points-paying event on the famed Autodromo Hermanos Rodriquez road course in Mexico City, Mexico. And Blaney has positive history at road course debuts, winning the first race at the Charlotte ROVAL in 2018.

The sport returns to the U.S. the following week for its annual stop at Pocono (Pa.) Raceway, where Blaney earned his career first victory in 2017.

“Michigan is kind of a unique place, but I feel really good about how our kind of mile-and-a-half program has been this year,” Blaney said. “It’s bigger than a mile-and-a-half, but a lot of the same tendencies as some of the mile-and-a-halves that we go to. So, I’m curious to see where we’re going to be at next weekend. The run that we had at Pocono last year was definitely good, getting to Victory Lane there. So, you just hope to keep building off those things. It definitely makes me look forward to next week.

“I always try to look forward to the next week, no matter if we win the race or run 35th,” Blaney continued. “I always try to close the book Monday morning and move on to next week and look forward to having a shot at winning, running well.

“I think it bodes well. Like I said earlier, I think our speed is really good, and that is kind of across short tracks and speedways and mile-and-a-halfs and two miles. So hopefully we can have a good run — big weekend next weekend for Ford and RP [team owner Roger Penske] being in their backyard.”