As the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs approached last season, Ryan Blaney and his team were, as he looks back on it now, afterthoughts. The Team Penske driver had a lone victory in the win column to make him postseason eligible, but his group was far from the strongest of those looking at a championship run.
But the No. 12 team stepped up when it mattered most, going on a tear to end the 2023 season with two wins and three more top-six finishes in the last six races as Blaney was crowned champion for the first time. A year later, as another postseason approaches, the narrative is entirely different.
“The last two months, I feel like we’ve really flexed our muscle and shown we’re a top-three team right now,” Blaney told ESPN. “My mindset — and I talk to my dad about his stuff — is: How do we make every other team afraid of this group getting close to the playoffs? That’s what we did last year in the Round of 8; we got everybody scared of us that we were clicking off some things and were the best car the last month of the year by far. How do we continue to bring that, not intimidation, but mindset, to other people?
“That’s important in every sport. You have teams that intimidate other groups because they’re strong and execute really well. How do we do that as well? So, it’s just a confidence thing from last year to this year. We know we can do it [because] we did it before.”
Confidence within the team was a recurring talking point for Blaney when discussing the tone of the 2024 season. A championship win might be the ultimate feat in Cup Series racing, but there has been no resting on past successes or trying to prove it wasn’t a fluke.
A demeanor shift happened after winning at Talladega Superspeedway in October last year. It was the victory that started the team’s run to the title. Travis Geisler, the Team Penske competition director, has felt Blaney has been “laser” focused ever since, and his driver doesn’t deny the significance of that particular victory.
Talladega came a week after Blaney was collected in a multicar crash at Texas Motor Speedway. It was a hit to his chance to advance in the postseason as he fell 11 points below the cutline, and the team knew things weren’t looking good.
“[Talladega] was the perfect moment for something like…
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