A grandfather clock awaits the winner at Martinsville Speedway. Ryan Blaney hopes the time is now to earn his first victory of the 2022 season.
Saturday’s Blue-Emu Maximum Pain Relief 400 (7:30 p.m. ET, FS1, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) will serve as Blaney’s 13th start at the 0.526-mile Virginia short track. His past six trips have included a pair of second-place results in 2020 and a combined average finish of 5.83.
Blaney is now focused on executing a complete race to have a shot at victory under the lights.
“I feel like three of the last four times we’ve been there, we’ve had a really good shot to win that race and probably had the best car and just we did not execute at the end of that race,” Blaney told NASCAR.com. “Kind of gave those away, to be honest with you. That’s something we’ve tried to work on — being able to rise to the occasion coming down to late pit stops and just not making mistakes. Hopefully, we’ve gotten that better. You just never know how you’re going to run at these places, especially with the new car.”
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The speed in the No. 12 Team Penske Ford has been prevalent each weekend, which showcases how Blaney and company have achieved an early grasp on what it takes to be successful in the Next Gen car. But the notes are slim for what it will take to be fast at Martinsville, relying on lessons learned at Phoenix Raceway and Richmond Raceway this year to piece together a game plan for the second short-track event of the year.
“Hopefully you can still use some of the things you did well with the old car at this track that you can apply to the new car,” Blaney said. “You don’t really know that until you get out there and practice and get into the race and see how everything’s going.
“A little bit is known, but a lot of it is unknown.”
After the retirement of Todd Gordon at the conclusion of the 2021 season, Blaney was tasked with finding a new crew chief to guide the ship. That effort led him to Jonathan Hassler, who came over from the No. 21 Wood Brothers Racing team after his term as crew chief for Matt DiBenedetto came to a close.
Blaney has reaped rapid benefits from having Hassler atop the pit box. In his seventh full-time Cup venture, Blaney is enjoying his second-best seven-race stretch to a season with a 13.14 average finish. In 2018, he earned an average finish of 8.0 in the first seven events.
“He and I kind of have the same personalities,” Blaney said. “Him and I just understand each other, and we kind of understood each other from the get-go. We started testing in the offseason. We understood each other’s language, he understood what I liked, and I understood what he liked to change. It’s kind of one of those things where the relationship kicks off the right way.”
With three poles in the last four races, two top fives and four top 10s this season, it has amounted to a tie atop the points standings with Hendrick Motorsports’ Chase Elliott. Despite a crash at Las Vegas Motor Speedway and a last-lap brush with the wall on the final lap at Atlanta Motor Speedway that took him out of contention, Blaney leads the Cup field with three stage wins and 66 stage points.
“Everyone’s had their issues,” Blaney said. “We’ve just been able to overcome some of those and be tied leading the points. We’d like to obviously have a win already. I thought we had a shot to win a couple of them, just didn’t really fall in our favor.”
After starting on the pole last Sunday at Richmond Raceway, Blaney led a race-high 128 laps, the 10th time in his career where he led 100 laps or more but didn’t wind up in Victory Lane. On the flip side, five of Blaney’s seven Cup victories have come with green-flag passes for the lead inside 10 laps to go.
For Blaney, it’s tough to look back on those 10 races and place blame on why the checkered flag didn’t fall his way. But it’s about being around at the end to give yourself a shot, not what you did to get there.
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“I don’t really think about that stuff too much,” Blaney. “Just try to figure out how to do the best you can all race. I don’t care if we go out and lead the whole race or I don’t care if we go out and lead one lap, as long as you go out and win the race, right? That’s the main goal. I don’t care how you get it done, as long as you do it.”
As the series prepares for another short-track showdown at Martinsville, where aggression and tempers are bound to happen, a credit to Blaney’s success is how well he’s able to shake the frost off after dustups he has had with other competitors.
That ability was apparent at Richmond, where hard racing with Ross Chastain led to fiery radio chatter from Blaney and a chain of payback between them. But what happens on the race track, stays on the race track.
“That’s just kind of how I am,” Blaney said. “I’ll get fired up about something in the moment. That’s just the competitive side of any sport, you get fired up in the moment. I’ve kind of always been that way. I gotta have my two cents about it for 15-20 seconds and then I’m over it and move on from it. I’ve just got to get some things off my chest in the moment and then I just move on and focus on other things.
“Everyone handles it in different ways. Other guys hold grudges for longer. It’s just not what I do.”