Remember the end of the 2021 NASCAR Cup Series regular season?
Ryan Blaney won at Michigan International Speedway and Daytona International Speedway in back-to-back weeks. He was already locked into the playoffs by virtue of a win earlier in the season, but the two consecutive victories — plus a pole to kick off the postseason at Darlington Raceway — seemed poised to launch the No. 12 team on an unprecedented playoff run.
That kind of happened. Blaney posted mostly respectable results, enough to survive for a while, but was eliminated after the Round of 8.
Flash forward two years later, and here’s Blaney in the playoffs, just one win under his belt and fair-to-middlin’ results leading up to them; he didn’t score a single top five between his Coca-Cola 600 win at the end of May and his subsequent victory in the Oct. 1 Cup race at Talladega Superspeedway. And yet he stayed alive in the playoffs.
As the great North Carolina State coach Jim Valvano said: “Survive and advance.”
That’s exactly what Blaney did, and when the occasion called for it, Blaney rose to meet it and won at Martinsville Speedway and then carried all that momentum into Phoenix Raceway with a shot at a championship.
In a season where fellow title contender William Byron had won six races, and his teammate Kyle Larson four — first and second-most among all drivers, respectively — Blaney was up against two heavyweights looking to return the Bill France Cup to Hendrick Motorsports after Blaney’s own teammate Logano interrupted their streak a year prior. Both of those drivers had won at Phoenix in a Cup car already (Larson to win the 2021 crown and Byron in the 2023 spring race), while the fourth title contender in Christopher Bell had won there in an Xfinity Series machine back in 2018. Blaney was the only driver of the four who had never won on the track, period.
And he did. Well, kind of. He beat the rest of his championship competitors, only being beaten by Ross Chastain, who won the race and everyone immediately forgot about it as Blaney crossed the line second to clinch the title.
It was an emotional win. Blaney, deemed one of NASCAR’s next great stars during his rise to the Cup Series, has racing in his blood, from grandfather Lou racing modifieds to dad Dave’s longstanding career in stock cars. Dave never won at the premier level, but Ryan did so and managed that by outlasting Kevin Harvick — whose last race,…
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