Ryan Blaney has embarked on his 400th NASCAR Cup Series start, taking the green flag in Sunday’s Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Blaney’s No. 12 Team Penske Ford started 13th in the 39-car field for the annual 400-miler (TNT Sports, truTV, HBO Max, IMS Radio Network, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). The 32-year-old driver is racing with extra incentive as a finalist in the championship round of the In-Season Challenge tournament, facing off against fellow Ford driver Todd Gilliland for the $1 million prize.
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Blaney made his first Cup Series start at Kansas Speedway on May 10, 2014, also driving the No. 12 Ford for Hall of Fame team owner Roger Penske. Since then, he’s collected 19 Cup Series wins, 14 pole positions and 100 top-five finishes, adding the Cup championship to his accomplishment list in 2023.
The bulk of Blaney’s NASCAR national-series career has been spent with Team Penske and its affiliated team, Wood Brothers Racing. In a Tuesday video conference previewing the In-Season Challenge final, Blaney marveled at how quickly the career milestone seemed to arrive.
“It does fly by. I had no idea it was 400 this weekend. It’s incredibly hard to believe,” Blaney said. “It kind of goes back to … none of this happens without Roger Penske, his group, the Wood Brothers, those folks have really given me the opportunity that I can only dream of. I would never have dreamt that I would make it to 400 starts. You just try to continue to take one start at a time, but it does fly by. It does not feel like 400, so I’ve been really lucky to have a great ride for those 400 starts and hopefully I can make it 400 more, for sure.”
Blaney entered Sunday third in the Cup Series standings with five races — including the Brickyard 400 — remaining in the regular season. He has already clinched a spot in the Chase postseason, and has wins this year at Phoenix Raceway and EchoPark Speedway near Atlanta.
Blaney noted how he’s closing in on a more personal milestone — the 473 Cup Series starts made by his father, Dave, over a career that spanned 17 seasons.
“Growing up around the sport, watching my dad do it, I just wanted to do what my dad did,” Blaney said. “I was in love with the sport. As a kid, I was just in awe of race-car drivers and race cars. I just wanted to do that and I’ve been really lucky in my life to get those opportunities and get amazing opportunities to be fairly successful in that sport that I love. … That’s gonna be a really big eye-opener for me if and when I pass my dad in career starts. That’s gonna be like, ‘Oh, man.’ I would never have thought that, but it’s been a fun 400 and, like I said, I hope to make it 400 more.”