Blaney proud of team effort after another race of pit road miscues

Ryan Blaney didn’t get his wish.

While standing on the grid at Darlington Raceway doing a hit for the pre-race show leading into Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race, the Team Penske driver noted that he didn’t want to have to pass as many cars as he did a few weeks ago at Phoenix Raceway. Blaney won that race, which was an impressive feat given his afternoon. On that day, multiple pit road issues kept putting him deep in the field.

Sunday afternoon wasn’t a win, but a third-place finish. And unfortunately, Blaney had to come through the field due to pit road issues.

“It’s a proud effort, for sure,” Blaney said. “Obviously, there are some things we have to address and work on internally, but I thought myself, the [No.] 45 and the [No.] 6 were the best three cars all day. I think that was pretty consistent. The [No.] 45 had to come from the back, but he was tremendous and was able to make good pace, and we just had a couple more issues than he did. Yeah, Brad was really, really good all day. So, I think the three of us were kind of the class of the field; it just took me a little bit longer to get back up there.

“But I’m proud of the effort of kind of fighting back after the things we had happen. It’s nice to have a good run at this place. It’s a hard day’s work at this place, and you try not to mess up and knock the fence down and stuff like that. Everyone should be proud of their efforts for getting where we did.”

At the end of the first stage, Blaney had to pull into teammate Austin Cindric’s pit box for the team to tighten a wheel. Blaney was listed in 20th position when the race restarted and had rebounded to just outside the top 10, in 11th position, at the end of the stage.

In the final stage, there was a slow pit stop that brought questions of a potential loose wheel. The team told the driver they were good as he rejoined the field.

“Far from good, man,” Blaney said. “Far from [expletive] good.”

Once again buried in the field, Blaney spent the last 91 laps making another charge. With less than 60 laps to go, he was back inside the top 10.

“It’s something we got to work on,” said Blaney of pit road.

As for getting back to the top five by the finish, he said, “I didn’t need to restart 22nd the last run, and I think we would have had a shot.”

According to NASCAR’s loop data statistics, Blaney made 124 green flag passes. It was second-most to Carson Hocevar, who made 128.

Blaney isn’t sure if he could have made a comeback like he did had the field been running the previous rules package.

“It’s hard to tell,” he said. “I feel like it definitely got more spread out with this package and once guys hit the cliff, they were base jumping off the cliff. It went downhill fast for a lot of guys, and I said in my TV interview earlier, this is the first time, I think, in my Cup career that I let a guy go like a few laps into a restart if he’s hounding me or come off pit road under green flag stops and I said to myself, ‘I’ll see you in about 20, and that happened.’

“I don’t know if that would have happened in the other package. So, I think it was a success. I think it was good; definitely not worse. So, it was a successful day of running that package here. I’m excited to run it more places.”