Seven years ago, Ryan Blaney came to Pocono Raceway without a NASCAR Cup Series win on his resume. Seven weeks ago, his three-car Team Penske operation was 0-for-Victory Lane for 2024.
How quickly things can change in this sport.
Blaney found his way to the front Sunday at Pocono, a mix of speed and strategy in securing his second career win at this triangular-shaped track. It was the 12th career Cup victory for the driver of the No. 12, racing as the reigning Cup champion rather than a wide-eyed 23-year-old, learning the ropes with the legendary Wood Brothers the first time he earned a trophy here in 2017.
"I've matured a little bit," Blaney said. "Yeah, I think you just get older. You just become a different person. As you get experience on earth, you just understand things a little bit more as opposed to when you were a young 20-year-old."
One of those keys to maturity is patience, something Blaney displayed on a day where strategy turned the scoring pylon into a yo-yo. A variety of drivers took their turns at the front before a Todd Gilliland crash on Lap 117 reset the field on the same pit cycle.
It's where Blaney's pit crew shined, a two-tire stop clearing his way to the front when Kyle Larson got busted for speeding. The driver took it from there, outlasting last week's winner Alex Bowman before cruising to a 1.3-second victory over seven-time Pocono winner Denny Hamlin.
"I feel like we've let a couple slip away in the last couple months," Blaney said. "Good to close one out. Jonathan [Hassler, crew chief] did an awesome job of sticking to our plan. We had a car that could do it and hold everybody off."
The same could be said for Ford teams exasperated over a slow start with a new Mustang body style. They spent the first three months of the year lagging behind Chevrolet and Toyota, whiffing on wins while watching drivers like Kyle Larson, William Byron and Hamlin run away with playoff points.
But with the NASCAR playoffs in September, not April, it's all about peaking at the right time. Ford should know; they came into last November a heavy underdog on championship weekend and left with trophies in all three of the sport's top divisions (Cup, Xfinity and Trucks). This time around, they're turning up the heat a little quicker, snatching up four wins in the last seven races with their Penske-powered operation.
Blaney now has two of those to go along with one apiece for teammates Austin Cindric and Joey Logano. It's been an evolution back toward excellence, Ford's long-term vision paying off with reigning champ Blaney front and center.
"I feel like the first couple months of the year, minus the speedways, we just didn't have the speed," Blaney explained. "It was just a dogfight to run fifth. That's like executing everything perfectly to run fifth.
"Now, I feel like our speed has gotten here in the last couple months of we execute everything perfectly, our speed is race-winning speed… wins will come your way more often if you can bring cars like that to the racetrack."
Traffic Report
Green: Alex Bowman. How often in this sport have we seen an immediate boost of confidence for a driver who snaps a long winless drought? Bowman's third-place finish, one week after emerging victorious at Chicago, is his first set of back-to-back top-three results in five years.
Yellow: Chris Buescher. Track position was key at Pocono and for a second, Buescher had it. Pit strategy got him out front for 19 laps, a potential winning move until that Lap 117 caution scrambled the field. In the end, an 11th-place finish was fine for this playoff bubble driver, but it's yet another race where a victory seemed within reach.
Red: Ross Chastain. A second crash in the last three races has left the Trackhouse Racing star precariously close to the playoff cutline. Still winless, he's just 27 points ahead of Bubba Wallace for that final spot with a number of Wallace's better tracks ahead (Indianapolis, Richmond, Daytona).
Speeding Ticket: Section 7. Four drivers total sped on their final pit stop of the day in this section: Kyle Larson, Chase Elliott, Daniel Suarez and Ty Gibbs. Only Elliott fought his way back into the top 10 as a quartet of drivers scratched their heads as to what went wrong.
"It was a bit of a bummer because I didn't push it," Larson said. "I didn't push it over our max. I never thought that I would be speeding."
For some reason, that section is where multiple cars sped during pre-race checks, unsure of whether NASCAR had tweaked the timing lines for this year. Nothing was called during the first round of stops, but when the entire field was encountering a problem it was only a matter of time.
"We had all of our lights to where we usually run them [at Pocono], and I guess all of NASCAR's timing lines were all different and changed," Gibbs added. "We were kind of winging it with the way the lights were."
Oops!
Kyle Busch is in the worst slump of his Cup career. A nudge by Corey LaJoie certainly didn't help. This multi-car incident started by contact with the No. 7 car led to Busch's fifth DNF in the last seven races, taking out Ryan Preece, Harrison Burton and Ricky Stenhouse Jr. along with him.
Busch withheld any displeasure with LaJoie after the race, remaining short and diplomatic in his comments. But owner Richard Childress had no problem expressing his own frustration on the radio.
It certainly didn't help that LaJoie's crew chief, Ryan Sparks, fanned the flames by insinuating Busch was muscling his way into a position on the track that forced LaJoie to retaliate.
"When you're 20th back there, dude, it's in the hornet's nest and you're seven wide into one," LaJoie said after the race. "If you're not the guy on the bottom, somebody else behind you is going to jam it in there and put you freaking middle, right. So I had a bit of a run… I got to the left rear of the 8, and he blocked it once… when he blocked it the second time it just turned it across my nose and tore up some good cars… I didn't feel like it was a boneheaded move. I had a run, I got to the left rear, he blocked it twice, and the second time he spun his ass out."
LaJoie wound up finishing the race in 19th.