New Hampshire win was vintage Ryan Blaney in every way

By Ryan Blaney standards, this wasn’t even a stereotypical radio meltdown after a pit road gaffe, but his response to it was vintage.

The Team Penske No. 12 had just won the second stage on Sunday at New Hampshire Motor Speedway when a slow pull on the left front cost him 13 positions. Blaney, who had experienced an above average number of pit woes this spring was frustrated but more level than usual.

Again, by his standards.

"Come on dawg. Like, fuck, man."

Veteran spotter and former racer Tim Fedewa, as he always seemingly does, knew exactly how to refocus the energy of the 2023 Cup Series champion.

“We’ll do it the hard way.”

Crew chief Jonathan Hassler did his part with a two-tire stop when the other top contenders took four and Blaney did the rest by making his left sides last against a hard-charging Bubba Wallace and Josh Berry over the final stint.

The hard way didn’t even look that hard, really.

“I've said this for years (but) whenever I say those things on the radio after something bad happens, it's like my relief valve,” Blaney said. “I just have to get it out in the open; then I get over it as soon as I say it. I have to say it or I'll be stewing over it for a while. That's how I have figured out just to get over things.”

Blaney says he wishes he wasn’t that way but he would rather process like this than stew over it and have the vibes derail his focus.

“Timmy (Fedewa) does a good job of having great reassurance when things happen, just being like, ‘Well, we're going to do this the hard way,’ and I’m like ‘Okay, fine by me.’ I just have to get things off my chest. It takes me 5-10 seconds, whatever it is, to move on.”

And really, in hindsight, the pit road issue kind of gave them an advantage. It allowed them to take two tires and be the first car on that strategy. If they had left the second stage break with the lead, the caution that flipped the strategy may have actually caused Blaney to be in the same position as Wallace and Berry.

Chasing someone else

“I think it definitely helped us get track position the way the cautions fell,” Hassler said. “So yeah, I think maybe it was a little bit of a blessing in disguise. If it doesn't happen that way, I think we're still right there in the hunt (but) it definitely gave us the opportunity to recover.”

Some will say that Wallace on four tires should have beat Blaney on two, but another way of looking at the race is that the best car all race got its track position back and there were just enough laps left to hold on.

“It was tough,” Blaney said of traffic. “It was in groups. (It) wasn't like one car (every) 10 car lengths, then (another) one. It was like two-to-four cars in a pack. Man, I'm trying to work through them. Trying not to mess up, trying to find the cleanest air possible.

“He was able to close in a little bit; able to get through that fairly decent. But, I mean, gosh, with 20 to go, … I was starting to struggle, kind of fading. I couldn't get off the corners as good as I wanted to. My entry started to go away.”

Blaney said he just didn’t want to make a mistake. Instead, he forced Wallace into one, driving in so deep that it necessitated a lock-up. Wallace said he would have needed eight tires to beat a Penske car on Sunday.

“We kind of knew the first 25-30 laps, they were better than us and then we kind of leveled off,” Wallace said. “I was trying not to overcook my stuff. What was that run, 70-something laps? The last 40, I’m just trying to hang on and make the most of it because this track is a game of inches. If you miss it by an inch, you miss it by a mile, and I just tried to take too much.”

Denny Hamlin clinched the top seed with a seventh-place finish but Ryan Blaney has high expectations for the final 10 races after their third win of the year … but only once they get there.

“I just try to take it week by week,” he said. “We did a great job this week of preparing for this race and accepting the challenges that were thrown at us today, from the start of the race to the middle to the end of it. Then Monday we will close the book on New Hampshire; then we will focus on Daytona.

“We've always, myself and Jonathan, we look ahead, but we have to put - at least me - I have to put 100% of my brainpower into the next race. I can't have half my brain thinking about Darlington or things like that. I have to give all my effort into one race.”