NASCAR: Can Ryan Blaney find the missing piece?

Ryan Blaney has not lacked speed throughout the 2020 NASCAR Cup Series season, but execution has not been a strong suit of the #12 team. Can they find that missing piece and compete for the championship?

Seven times throughout his NASCAR Cup Series career, Ryan Blaney has led a race for more than 100 laps.

Not once has he been to victory lane in those races.

The four-time race winner and three-time winner for Team Penske has been fast at almost every venue since signing with Roger Penske’s team as the driver of the #12 Ford ahead of the 2018 season, but execution has not been a strong suit of the #12 team.

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Most recently, take the race at Texas Motor Speedway. He dominated the race, leading 150 of the 334 laps. He won stage one and he won stage two. But a late caution flag period after he had just made a pit stop ruined his chances to win, and he could only rally for a seventh place result.

A similar thing happened at Las Vegas Motor Speedway earlier this year. He was leading the race and appeared to be well on his way to victory before a late caution flag period led to crew chief Todd Gordon making the decision to have him pit for new tires. That ended up being the wrong move, as he finished in 11th place following the overtime restart.

These kinds of tough breaks are nothing to Blaney. But the speed that he has shown has the 26-year-old believing that he could win the championship, which is slated to be decided at Phoenix Raceway on Sunday, November 8, if it were held tomorrow, as he believes that he and the #12 team can “rise to the occasion” and find that execution that they simply have lacked.

“I’d like to hope so,” he said. “I feel like, obviously it’s been Kevin [Harvick] and Denny [Hamlin] this year, they’ve been incredibly strong, Kevin in particular here the last handful of weeks has just been lights-out. The 11 car has obviously had great speed as well.

“But I feel like we’re not that far away from them. I personally feel like we’ve been really competitive, we just haven’t had the finishes as those guys, they’ve been able to rack up the wins. Whether it’s bad luck or just things happening, I feel like we’re competitive with those guys, it’s just a matter of putting it all together.

“So I’d love to be able to fight our way to Phoenix and just give ourselves a shot in that final four, that’s really all you can ask for, just trying to get there and have a shot at it. So I’d love to get there just to be able to race with those guys, because I feel like we can rise to the occasion. Just one way to find out: we have nine races to race our butts off and just get there, and we’ll go to work from there.”

But even when you look at all the bad breaks with which Blaney has dealt over the last few seasons, things can go both ways; when you look at Blaney’s wins as a Team Penske driver, he could very well have zero and could be considered fortunate to have the three that he has.

He won the inaugural race at the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval back in October of 2018 when Jimmie Johnson wrecked Martin Truex Jr. in the final turn trying to take the race lead.

He won by 0.007 seconds over Ryan Newman in a photo finish at Talladega Superspeedway in October of 2019.

And he won by 0.007 seconds (again) over Ricky Stenhouse Jr. in another photo finish at Talladega Superspeedway in June of 2020.

He didn’t lead the entire final lap in any one of these wins, and he led the penultimate lap only once, with that having taken place when he beat Newman to the finish line.

And Blaney will be the first one to tell you that he hasn’t yet broken through.

“I think it’s yet to come,” he said when asked if he believes he has experienced his one true breakthrough moment as a Cup Series driver. “Those have been exciting finishes, and we’ve been fortunate to be on the good end of those finishes. But I want to win races by five or six seconds. Those are dominating days when you can do that. If you can start steadily winning races by a large amount, they really speak to your team.”

Again, they have had the speed to do it. They simply haven’t been able to get that outright victory yet.

“I feel like we’ve been in a spot to do that, it’s just things have happened that we haven’t been able to break through,” he added. “But I think the best is yet to come, at least I hope, and we’re working the best we can to try to make that happen, to make it possible.”

But Blaney doesn’t sulk in the negatives of having had multiple wins slip away from him over the years. He is far more focused on the positive aspect: the fact that he has run at the front so often and been able to be a regular contender. This year alone, he has led 548 laps, fifth most among all drivers.

“It’s easy to maybe dwell on the negatives when things don’t go your way and you have some bad luck and things happening or maybe not being able to close out these races,” he said. “It’s easy to dwell on that stuff, all that negative stuff.

“But I try to take positives away from situations. Our cars have been in the hunt. They’ve been in the running to compete. It’s just a matter of cleaning some stuff up. So that’s what I try to focus on and try to work on. Like okay, when something goes wrong, could we have done anything to prevent it? And if we could, okay learn from those mistakes. If not, that’s part of racing.

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“But I’ve always been trying to focus on the positive things. Really, unless you learn from them, there’s nothing you can do about negative things that happen. It’s just a matter of how you react to them and how you grow from those experiences. So that’s something I’ve always tried to look at.”

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