FORT WORTH, Tex. – Winning Stage 2 of Sunday’s O’Reilly Auto Parts 500 at Texas Motor Speedway may haunt Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series driver Ryan Blaney and his Wood Bros. Racing team until they get to Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway in two weeks.
After dominating and winning the first two stages of Sunday’s race, earning 20 regular season points and two playoff points, Blaney’s day took a ghastly turn – where track position and a botched late race pit stop hindered his opportunity to contend not only for his first career win, but a top-10 finish too.
“That last pit stop was pretty discouraging,” said Blaney. “We got back in that third debris caution. I don’t know what it was there at the end of segment two and that made everybody have split strategies and we got in the back and couldn’t pass anybody.
“It was terrible to try to pass people. We made our way up to seventh or eighth and then pitted and I got into our box too long and we were wedged in between two cars. I was over the line by a few inches.
“That sucked. I put us in that hole. We probably should have stayed out looking back on it but that is easy to do. I think it says a lot about this Motorcraft Quick Lane team about how good a car we had today.”
Blaney’s weekend started off strong when he qualified his No. 21 Motorcraft / Quick Lane Tire & Auto Center Ford second and quickly stole the lead from pole sitter Kevin Harvick on Lap 16 and battled Harvick and Martin Truex Jr. for the stage victory.
Flexing his car’s muscle with its drive off (the corners) in Turns 1 and 2 especially, Blaney was able to make quick work from any challenges for the race lead throughout Stage 2.
Nearing its conclusion, on Lap 165, the caution waved putting teams with a tough decision whether to pit for new tires or stay out and defend their position. Blaney and a host of others decided to stay out and fight.
A good restart allowed Blaney to check out and sail to his second stage win of the season, but it also came at a price. While most of the field behind had fresher tires, Blaney made his routine pit stop and restarted 24th.
Avoiding being wrecked twice during his climb back through the field, Blaney was steadily able to climb back to eighth when a debris caution bunched up the field. A caution that should have benefited the team — backfired. Blaney overshot his pit, then his tire changer suffered a faulty gun putting him around 18th for the restart.
In the final 30 laps or so, Blaney was able to recover and finish 12th, earning his fourth top-12 finish of 2017.
Looking back, Blaney says that they maybe should have pitted for tires before the end of Stage 2, but with points so crucial in NASCAR’s new playoff format, they elected to collect points instead.
“It’s easy to look back on it and say, oh, we should have done this, should have done that,” said Blaney. “Now I say we should have stayed out the last caution and might have had a better shot at it. But you can’t really change any of that now. Yeah, in hindsight that was kind of a judgment call.
“You give up a stage win and 10 point and a bonus point for the playoffs to try to set yourself for the end of the race. We thought we had enough time after segment 2 to try to work our way back up through there, and a restart actually after segment 2 really went bad for us. We got jumbled up in 1 and 2 and let a lot of cars get by.
“That was kind of the deciding factor I feel like. I let a lot of good cars get by like the 48 and 42 and 24, and that hurt us more, I think, than anything was that restart after segment 2 when we had to check up big in 1 and 2. I thought we made the right call to stay out there and try to win that segment. I’m for that.”
Blaney, a native of High Point, N.C. finished second in Saturday’s XFINITY Series race for Team Penske. He said running the extra 300-miles made him that much better during what he described as the “most positive race we’ve had as a team.”
“The XFINITY race did help out a lot, running that yesterday,” he said. “I definitely got done with that race and we had a meeting right after to figure out what we were going to do for today and changes, and we did a lot of things that our XFINITY car needed, and I felt like that helped out for today. So yeah, that was a big, big gain for us to run the XFINITY cars, so that was good.”
Heading into the off week, Blaney sits sixth in the Cup Series standings heading to Bristol Motor Speedway in two weeks, where he is encouraged based on their short track performance at Martinsville.
“I feel like our past couple weeks, even though we haven’t gotten the great finishes we deserve, I felt like our cars have been really, really fast,” sounded Blaney. I thought it said a lot about our team and car last week to run good at Martinsville. The first half of the race where I’ll publicly say it’s my worst racetrack, and that’s the racetrack I look forward to going to the least on the schedule, and to run well there, that definitely was a help, and then to have a fast car here has been really good.
“We’re great in the first half of races, we just need to figure out how to finish them off, and that’s tough part to do. That’s where I think some of these great teams really rise up and can finish races and position themselves for the end of these races, and with this team, I feel like we’re getting better at that. Fast cars definitely help, we just have to try to find ourselves in position to be up front towards the end and to have a fast-enough car to try to compete for a win.”
Blaney led 148 Sunday, the first-time Wood Bros. Racing led more than 100 laps in a Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series race since Rockingham Speedway in 1982 with driver Neil Bonnet.
Follow Chris Knight on Twitter @Knighter01.
