For the first 13 weeks of the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series season, the refrain surrounding Ryan Blaney and the No. 12 Team Penske team was the same: if only some luck could go their way.
At Nashville Superspeedway on Sunday night, it finally did, and Blaney earned his first victory of the season, in dominant fashion at that. He led 139 of 300 laps and controlled the entire final stage after taking the top spot on a restart from teammate Joey Logano.
As long as his team continues to execute, it should be the first of several trips to the winner's circle for the 2023 Cup Series champion.
Everything is finally falling into place for Ryan Blaney
Since first moving in-house to Team Penske in 2018, it feels like Blaney has perpetually been on the verge of making a major statement. Yet more than seven years in, and even with a championship to his name, there are many who still don't view him as one of the sport's most dominant drivers. He only has 14 career wins, and his respective career highs in wins, top five finishes, and top 10 finishes are three, 12, and 20.
There are reasons for that. Blaney went through a number of crew chiefs early in his career before finding one who stuck in Jonathan Hassler, with whom he was paired starting in 2022. Unfortunately for him, that was also the same season in which Team Penske on the whole noticeably declined in the speed department, despite Logano experiencing a late-season surge to win the title.
Even though Logano won four times in 2022 while Blaney went winless, their numbers were otherwise virtually identical. The next season, it would be Blaney's turn to catch lightning in a bottle at the end of the season to capture his first championship, and while his full-season numbers don't seem overly impressive on the surface, this was because Penske took an even further step backwards.
Both Logano and Austin Cindric saw significant declines from their 2022 performance, leaving the second-generation star to carry the organization on his shoulders.
He would do the same in 2024, despite Logano managing to put together the darkest voodoo magic-aided title run in the history of NASCAR's playoffs. Blaney outshone his teammate in every statistical category besides wins, but Penske's cars still lacked the speed on a week-to-week basis of teams such as Hendrick Motorsports and Joe Gibbs Racing.
That has changed in 2025, and it's led to Blaney quietly having the most productive season of his career. Only 14 races in, he's already at least halfway to setting new career-highs in top five finishes and laps led, and had only a few things shaken out differently, he could already be sitting on three wins.
He was dominant at Homestead-Miami Speedway before his engine expired, and he had just completed a masterful drive through the field to take the lead in the closing laps at Darlington Raceway when a late caution cost him the win.
Most of the time, luck tends to eventually even out, and provided that remains the case for Blaney, he could reach a higher level than ever in the coming months and years. For the first time in his career, he finally has all the right pieces around him, and that's bad news for the rest of the field.