1. Ryan Blaney Is Even Better This Season
Repeating as the champion in any sport that has a full-season championship is hard. Even when a team is clearly superior to the rest of the field, so much can change from year to year that climbing the mountain all over again becomes a daunting task.
In stock car racing, a team sport masquerading as an individual pursuit, that’s proven to be even more apt. No driver has won consecutive NASCAR Cup Series championships in more than a decade when Jimmie Johnson was finishing up his run of five straight titles, a feat that only grows more incredible with the passage of time.
Despite that very significant caveat, there’s now little doubt that Ryan Blaney looks to be in the type of form to make a real challenge for a second straight Cup Series crown. Except for a brief three-week swoon that ran from Darlington Raceway to World Wide Technology Raceway, Blaney has equaled or outperformed his 2023 campaign in pretty much every way through 21 races:
- Two wins to one, with an almost certain third slipping away at Gateway when he ran out of gas with one to go.
- Ten top 10s, the same as he had at this point last season.
- Six top fives to four.
Blaney and the No. 12 team seem confident but not cocky, and with the Ford camp shaking off its general malaise from the start of the season, it’s not hard to see why. A lot will have to go right to even be in position for a back-to-back charge this fall, but there’s definitely reason to believe that the current champ has a chance to maintain that status into 2025.
2. Whatever Happened to Ross Chastain?
Ross Chastain has history on his side. It’s been very hard for someone in the final spot in the Cup Series playoff field to lose it on points (losing it to someone below them winning is an entirely separate issue) with only a few races left in the regular season.
That’s good for the Melon Man because nothing else is going his way at the moment. The last three races have included Chastain’s two worst finishes of 2024, including a season-worst 36th at Pocono Raceway.
It didn’t look like it would be this kind of campaign for Chastain and the No. 1 bunch, who kicked things off with four top 10s in the first six races. Since then? They’ve managed just three more, only one top five and zero wins.
You’d expect that last stat to change since Chastain won two races in each of the previous two seasons. If it doesn’t, however, a…
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