Among the questions Ryan Blaney fielded after his first NASCAR Cup Series win of the season Sunday night, one of the most innocuous was … what’s with the cigar?
A sponsor or partner at Nashville Superspeedway was handing them out, Blaney explained, so in a Red Auerbach-style flourish, he fired it up. The well-savored stogie made it with him all the way to the 1.33-mile track’s media center after the Victory Lane compulsories. The prop wasn’t as outlandish or oversized as the horseshoe-shaped wreath of flowers that teammate Austin Cindric brought from the post-race celebration to his news conference at Talladega Superspeedway back in April, but the sentiment was there all the same.
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Spare Blaney the indulgence after what had been a ragged first one-third of the Cup Series season for the Team Penske driver. The accomplishment was a boon to the former series champion and his No. 12 Ford team, but it also made his organization the first to place all four of its cars — including affiliates — into the Cup Series Playoffs, leaving it well-positioned for another postseason push.
“Just been pretty rocky this year and had a lot of misfortune and a lot of down times, just crappy things happening to us,” Blaney said, “and it’s like, ‘man, what do we got to do to just finish these races or close one out and just kind of things go our way.’ So I think that was more — it’s kind of like, I don’t want to say relief, but just like, OK, finally nothing crazy happened and we were able to just run our own race and bring the speed and execute and do our job very, very well.”
“Rocky” might be an odd description to hear from a driver who topped the early Cup Series standings after netting top 10s in the first two races, but consider the wild mood swings that his results have endured since. The three consecutive DNFs that followed took their toll, from an engine failure at Phoenix, a crash at Las Vegas and another mechanical blow-up at Homestead. The rest of the way has yielded almost an alternating cascade of top-five finishes or early exits, with two more wrecks (Talladega, Charlotte) offsetting the high points.
Riding those undulations has come slightly easier, Blaney said, thanks to a no-panic approach to each race weekend from the team that surrounds and supports him. Aside from a slight shuffle to the No. 12 team’s pit-crew personnel back in April, the group has been unflappable, Blaney said, keeping a steady mindset that tries not to dwell on the negatives that the Cup Series circuit tends to serve up.
“I think just trying to maintain the energy of the group is probably the biggest challenge,” said No. 12 crew chief Jonathan Hassler, who boosted the team’s fortunes with a masterful Stage 1 pit strategy that gave Blaney much-needed track position. “My message to them and even to myself has been that we’re perfectly capable. We’ve been in position. A lot of things have happened that are outside of our control. We just need to keep doing what we can, controlling what we can control, and things will finally turn around, and it’s nice that they did today.”
Outside of their control was a theme on multiple fronts just one week earlier in the Coca-Cola 600, a race that Blaney won in dominant fashion two years ago on the way to his first Cup Series crown. A Stage 3 jam-up snared his No. 12 Ford in this year’s Memorial Day classic at Charlotte Motor Speedway, saddling him with his fifth finish outside of the top 25 this season.
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Compounding that misstep was the chatter surrounding Team Penske’s IndyCar effort, which absorbed severe penalties in qualifications for the Indianapolis 500. Those infractions led to a housecleaning by team owner Roger Penske, and the dismissal of the organization’s top IndyCar brass rippled through the motorsports world.
Though that operation runs on a separate circuit, the IndyCar and NASCAR programs share a roof under the Team Penske banner in North Carolina. With that fallout still relatively fresh, Blaney was more than happy to provide some welcome good news to his owner and captain.
“Yeah, we had to hear all week that Penske cars are bad because the IndyCar guys got caught and that’s why we were bad at Charlotte and then we come here tonight and kick everyone’s ass,” Blaney said. “Ebbs and flows of this sport, it’s crazy.”
Those flows have now primed the postseason opportunity for Team Penske to extend its run of three consecutive Cup Series titles. The closely allied Wood Brothers Racing team became the first to cash in with Josh Berry’s breakthrough in Vegas, and Penske pilots Cindric (Talladega) and Joey Logano (Texas) came next on consecutive weeks that bridged April into May.
“Huge,” said Blaney after he rounded out Penske’s playoff-clinch sweep with his Nashville dominance, noting how synced the organization’s teams are at this point of the season. With that long-ranging goal secured, the pressure for the rest of the regular season is mostly off and the organization can devote at least some of its attention to the final 10-race stretch.
That doesn’t mean fading any of the focus or altering the approach for the weeks ahead. Keeping victory cigars at the ready, though, might be a needed change.
“Honestly, I don’t think that like anybody lays up after they win a race,” Blaney said. “It’s not like they go on this whole science experiment type of thing because being top 10 in points matter in the regular season. It’s playoff points. You still want to run well and you still want to win races. But it does matter. It just kind of sets it all at ease, like OK, we’re in the playoffs. All that stuff is good. Nice to finally get the monkey off your back and win a race and then move on and go try to win more.”